Converso Traits in Spanish Baroque: Revisiting the Everlasting Presence of Teresa of Ávila as Pillar of Hispanidad

Abstract

Some of Spain’s greatest humanists—Juan Luis Vives, Antonio de Nebrija, Juan de Ávila, Luis de León, and Benito Arias Montano—were from a converso background. Recent scholarship suggests that two of the three most influential religious movements in sixteenth-century Spain—Juan de Ávila’s evangelical movement and Teresa of Ávila’s Barefoot Carmelites—were founded by conversos and presented converso membership, whose winds of religious innovation to tame Christian Orthodoxy and Counter-Reformation Spanish society, through the influence of Italian Humanism and reform, prioritized spiritual practice, social toleration, and religious concord. Indeed, Santa Teresa de Ávila, a major innovator within the Spanish Church, was herself from a converso family with Jewish ancestry. She became a key female theologist who transcended as an identity marker of the Spanish Baroque, conceived as quintessential of the Spanish Golden Age. Coopted in different periods, she “reappeared” in the 1930s as Patron of the Sección Femenina de la Falange y de las JONS, the women’s branch of the new radical right, turning into a role model of femininity for highly conservative religious women. Consecrated as “Santa de la Raza”, she became the undisputable womanized icon of the so-called “Spanish Crusade”, the slogan which General F. Franco implemented, with the approval of the Spanish Catholic Church, to re-cast in a pseudo-theological narrative the rebellion against the Spanish Second Republic in July 1936. This article examines different appropriations of the figure of Teresa de Ávila as a pillar of “Hispanidad”, in the last centuries within the changing sociopolitical contexts and theological debates in which this instrumentalization appeared. By highlighting the plasticity of this converso figure, the article suggests possible lines of research regarding the Jewish origins of some national icons in Spain.

1. Introduction

Is it a coincidence that many among Spain’s greatest humanists—Juan Luis Vives, Juan de Vergara, Juan de Ávila, Luis de León, and Benito Arias Montano, but also Fernando de Rojas, the author of La Celestina, a pillar of early modern Spanish literature—were from a converso background? According to recent scholarship (e.g., Egido 1982, 2015a, 2015b; Ingram 2018), two of the three most influential religious movements in sixteenth-century Spain, Juan de Ávila’s evangelical movement and Teresa of Ávila’s Barefoot Carmelites, were founded by figures of converso origins, presenting a significant converso audience and membership.

Scholars such as Mercedes García-Arsenal argue that the religion and culture of Christian society were transformed and redefined through confrontation with, and rejection of, what the Old Christian majority considered, in religious and cultural terms, characteristic of groups coming from other religions. They did so with an attitude of permanent debate and re-affirmation. The result was a deeply conformist society that welcomed a unified, single, and rigid model, as the statutes of limpieza de sangre clearly reveal. Such society was prone to produce movements of dissidence and resistance through different forms of mysticism (e.g., alumbrados) and of interior religiosity, developments which were linked to movements of reform. The Jewish converts who took part in those movements gave way to complex and multivocal groups, in dialogue with Old Christians and open to the transmission and translation of ideas, images, and religious emotions. Always conditioned by the pressure of polemics and condemnations, these groups defined themselves through their engagement with each other (García-Arenal 2013). A case in point is Alonso de Cartagena (1384 Burgos–1456 Villasandino), the son of one of the most important rabbis of the time, Salomon Ha-Levi. Alonso, who later became the bishop of Burgos, and a prominent figure in fifteenth-century Castilian politics, elaborated on religious texts concerning converts’ passages to Christianity and their modalities to access the new religion. In so doing, he borrowed from the Gospels and Paul’s Epistles to insist on the equality of all Christians and the regeneration created by baptism. Hence, he put into circulation a textual tradition that stressed the revolutionary nature of conversion and baptism while insisting on the possibility of preserving one’s Jewish past. In so doing, Alonso not only placed a cognitive experience of enlightenment at the center of his meaning of Christianity and of entering the Christian body but also enlarged and simplified the converts’ insertion in the Christian faith. Because, in the same way as sun light touches all creatures indistinctively, maintained Alonso, so divine light renders “old” and “new” Christians equal to one other. His novel way of thinking about the individual Christian’s relationship with God meant that this relationship needs no mediation nor requires the monitoring and ritual constraints of the institutional church (Pastore 2024).

The debates arising from the status of new converts, their descendants, and their role in Christian society soon infiltrated every realm of Iberian social and political life, calling into question the traditional definitions of the boundaries of the Christian community, the theological reflections concerning the position of so-called New Christians, and the ways in which it might be possible to prevent this group from being considered equal to Old Christians. In any case, the success of upwardly mobile converts posed a problem for Old Christian society. And it was specifically toward these dynamic groups that the early limpieza de sangre statuses and the Inquisitorial offensive were directed. In the same line of García-Arenal, Stefania Pastore argues that it was the long history of violence, conquest, and assimilation, which began with the forced baptisms of Jews in 1391 and continued throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, that shaped the religious and theological debate, becoming the central problem of Iberian culture and society.1 Her premise is that “the confessional violence unleashed after 1391—and the erasure of visible and legal differences between religious minorities after they accepted to be baptized—explains much of the theological history of the period” (Pastore 2024, p. 6). However, as opposed to authors who defined the “exceptionalism” of the Iberian Conversos’ condition as Américo Castro (Castro 1948) or their unique, divided selves characterized by a split identity as in the case of Yirmihahu Yovel (Yovel 2009) to mention but some of the scholars who searched for an all-encompassing ultimate essence, Pastore opposes the essentialization of the conversos. Instead, she rightly insists on considering a wide spectrum of conditionings and responses to the converso labelling provided by different actors, be them the Inquisition, Old Christians, Jews, and the converts themselves (Pastore 2024).

Departing from a different perspective, researchers as Kevin Ingram trace what he defines as the New Christians’ zeal for religious innovation as one of their markers. Their zeal for reformism, he claims, could be seen as an attempt to combat Christian Orthodoxy. The religious innovation that various New Christians theologues and priests engaged with emphasized the importance of spiritual practice, social toleration, and religious concord while they strongly worked to reform Catholic Christianity from within (Ingram 2018). Purposefully or not, such trends could tame, albeit in a subtle fashion, the Counter-Reformation Spanish society’s obsession to fight the different voices coming from the Protestant Reform of the Catholic Church.

It is in this contextualization that Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda y Ahumada, later known as Teresa de Ávila, herself of Jewish ancestry, became paradoxical, the major female theologist of the Spanish Church that the Council of Trent adopted to fight against the Luteran Reform. Indeed, Teresa de Ávila transcended in Spanish History as a major mystic reformer and as an identity marker of what is considered a quintessential pillar of both the Spanish and Catholic essence in the 16th and 17th centuries: the Spanish Baroque. To address this paradox, the present article examines different appropriations of the figure and writings of Teresa of Ávila as a marker of Spanish Catholicism then, and as a bastion of Hispanidad in modern and contemporary times. These appropriations, articulated within changing historical and sociopolitical contexts, and theological debates, proved instrumental to a variety of institutions, groups, and leaders. By elaborating on this perspective, the following analysis focuses on the plasticity and malleability of converso figures and or of Jewish ancestry in Spanish culture as is definitely the case of Teresa de Ávila, who has survived as a multivocal icon as revealed in the official ceremonies sponsored by the Spanish Catholic Church, the Spanish State, the Spanish Royal family, and the academy in 2015 that commemorated the quincentennial birth of the “Saint of Saint”.

Certainly, the historical and religious context in which Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda y Ahumada lived and made a name for herself are crucial to understand her oeuvre and activism, and how it was posthumously instrumentalized at different historical conjunctures. Hence, the next sections address the socio-historical circumstances that conditioned the life of the conversos in urban settings such as Toledo, where Teresa’s grandfather came from, prior to and after 1492, and that of Ávila in the sixteenth century, together with Teresa’s family background and upbringing. I do so by considering the tensions between the notion of selfhood and Pierre Bourdieu’s criticism of the biographical illusion (Bourdieu 2000), a critical tool to scrutinize the artificiality of “life histories”. A third section elaborates on the persistent yet always changing forms of appropriation, mainly between the late 19th and early 21st centuries, by official and ecclesiastical institutions as well as by a diverse cadre of social actors. Far from reviewing the always growing literature on Teresa de Ávila or adding new interpretations to her major writings or letters, the purpose of the present article is to critically revisit a paradox that is still overshadowed in twenty-first-century Spanish official culture. In other words, the revealing converso traits within the Spanish Baroque has not changed the fact that Teresa of Ávila remains a malleable, flexible, yet everlasting pillar of an essentialist understanding of “Hispanidad”.

Being in the Iberian World as a Converso

After the Edict of Expulsion in 1492, imposed by the Catholic Monarchs as an early attempt at ethnic purification in the early modern period, the Jews, ceased to be, at least theoretically, a real and tangible presence in Spanish society. Their absence was partially filled by a new, more complex, and at the same time diffuse social category: the so-called New Christians or conversos. Alongside the attempts to eradicate the “flesh-and-blood” Jew from the fabric of Spanish society, the Jew—both male and female—was reinterpreted as an imaginary symbol of an extremely despised otherness. Additionally, the figure of the converso emerged, embodying new facets of an otherness that was deeply feared, closely monitored, and, in many cases, relentlessly persecuted (Amran 2003, 2009). The limpieza de sangre (pure blood) laws, starting with the 1449 Sentencia-Estatuto of Toledo, formalized what Old Christian society had long felt: the converts and their heirs were not authentic co-religionists and thus should not be allowed to become bona fide members of Christian society.

Spain’s communities of converts represented only a small fraction of the overall population, but a significant proportion of the urban elite society, where proto-bourgeois converts that included merchants, artisans, and, above all, professionals and men of letters often outnumbered the Old Christians (Molinié-Bertrand 1985; Domínguez Ortiz 1992).2 According to Ingram, proto-bourgeois conversos’ more belligerent non-conformism that he spots, especially on the second, third, or more generations removed from the conversion process, further conditioned many within this minority of disaffected conversos to promote socio-religious change from within while combating Old Christian prejudice. For Ingram, to preserve one’s ‘fragile’ castizo (pure) identity, it was necessary to very carefully handle advocacy for reform. One major strategy was advocating a socio-religious system based on equality and merit. In Ingram’s analysis, the conversos’ attempts to be integrated into the upper echelons of society also addressed, at the same time, deep psychological issues of self-worth and belonging. They battled not only with how they perceived themselves and were perceived by others but also with how they were monitored and controlled.3

In that respect, their turning to the Italian Humanist movement and its appeal to the ideals of antiquity that championed personal merit (virtus and talent) could be read as a search for self-esteem, legitimacy, and social mobility (Garin 1986).4 The Humanist shift redefined man as an autonomous individual rather than a component of medieval social hierarchies (Rico 1993).5 Humanism appealed to converso cultural elites, traders, and professionals because it promoted the idea that nobility could stem from virtù rather than lineage. For this minority group, Christian humanism that advocated a minimalist Christianity based on a more egalitarian evangelical message in the Gospel allowed conversos to view themselves not as the objects of Christian slander but as a distinct, virtuous group, much like Saint Paul’s neophytes or Rome’s novus homo, whose achievements were based on talent and morality, not bloodline. As humanists, the conversos could criticize Orthodox Catholic Spain as moralists rather than marginalized people or converts (Ingram 2013).

Antonio de Nebrija (1444 Lebrija–1522 Alcalá de Henares), author of the first Spanish Grammar and the Spanish Humanist, is central to discussing the impact of Humanism and of Erasmus of Rotterdam in Spain (Markish 1986; Delgado Jara 2023).6 Reviewing the probable converso origins of Antonio de Nebrija, Diego Moldes’ recent study (Moldes 2023) employs demographic, sociological, and literacy evidence from the Crown of Castile between the 1440s and 1500 to advance the likelihood of Nebrija’s converso ancestry.7 Considering that Andalusia contained the largest converso population in Spain and that Nebrija’s relatives were literate, Moldes examines the plausible converso origins of his parents or grandparents. For Moldes, Nebrija’s lifelong interest in Jewish history and language combined with the latter’s decades-long engagement with biblical exegesis that established him as a pioneering Hebraist outside the clergy are further proof of Nebrija’s converso traits.8 And while Nebrija’s interactions with the Inquisition raised questions about his ancestry, in 1506, Nebrija obtained a certificate of blood purity (limpieza de sangre) for his son Sancho, required for enrolment at the University of Bologna. At this time, the University of Salamanca had already barred conversos from its faculty, though Nebrija himself held a teaching position there. Moldes suggests that Nebrija successfully managed to conceal his ancestry. Be that as it might, Nebrija’s 1506–1507 trial by the Inquisition for heresy—not for Judaizing—offers no definitive evidence of his lineage. Yet, Nebrija’s social and professional connections with Jewish people and conversos, his decision to abandon a stable ecclesiastical career for the uncertain path of a grammarian, and the rabbinic expectations of founding and educating a family—an obligation Nebrija fulfilled—make the possible converso origins of Antonio de Nebrija more convincing than the alternative. Paradoxically, being a converso, in the Iberian world, with the inherent own self-suspicion image attached to this labelling, was also a game of mirrors, full of conditionings and constraints, both subtle yet direct, equally compelling yet beatable, that allowed figures such as Antonio de Nebrija and Teresa de Ávila to transcend as no less than everlasting pillars of Hispanidad.

2. Teresa’s Life Trajectory

She was born Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda y Ahumada on 28 March 1515, twenty-three years after the 1492 Decree of Expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula. It is proved that Teresa had Jewish ancestors. Her converso grandfather, Juan Sánchez de Toledo, was a rather well-to-do cloth merchant with business connections. Juan struggled to blend with Toledano society by marrying a woman from a distinguished Old Christian family and substituting his own surname and that of his children, Sánchez, with that of his old Christian wife, Cepeda. Nevertheless, he was requested by the Inquisition in 1485, facing punitive measures against him and his family, due to alleged secret observance of Jewish rituals and customs. The fact that Juan Sánchez de Toledo and his kin had to wear the Sanbenito meant that they were considered untrustworthy by the authorities. Juan responded to this situation by moving his family from Toledo to Ávila. He even sought to provide his family with a hidalgo status in a legal move at a court of law in Ciudad Real where he owned property. Teresa’s father, Alonso Sánchez de Cepeda, received a second document reaffirming his hidalguía, extended by the Valladolid Chancery in 1523. Alonso, himself an early widower, had a second marriage with Beatriz Dávila Ahumada y de las Cuevasa, a rich heiress born to an illustrious Castilian family from Olmedo, and mother of Teresa. She gave him ten children. All Teresa’s brothers took military careers and ventured in Spain’s colonization enterprises in North Africa and the New World.

Teresa faced early adversity as her mother passed away when she was only 13 years old. She received education and guidance under the care of her elder sisters. Her father also played a significant role in her upbringing, encouraging and supporting her intellectual interests. Biographers argue that he accompanied her spiritual journeys and questioning. Eire’s critical reading of Teresa’s testimonies of her early life as presented in Vida (Santa Teresa de Jesús [1967] 2021) pays attention to her reading habits (from saint hagiographies to books of chivalry and later devotional texts) (Eire 2019). Her initial stay at the Convent Our Lady of Grace was a first taste of monastic life that was interrupted by the initial symptoms of what would be a life of very poor health and illness.

2.1. Between Selfhood and Biographical Illusion

Teresa’s second and definite entry to the Carmelite Convent of the Incarnation of Ávila in 1535—strongly objected by her father who invoked her early age—marked the beginning of her life as a nun. Throughout the years, she struggled to reaffirm her trajectory and authority in the Convent environment and beyond and nurtured close ties with educated converso figures as the young Jerónimo de Gracián. Their intellectual exchanges and discussions regarding spiritual experiences and new understandings of unmediated search and contact with the Divine found a fertile venue and confluence with Teresa’s early reading and elaboration of a newly published book, Tercer Abecedario Espiritual, by the Franciscan friar Francisco de Osuna. Osuna’s Alphabet was a how-to book, a primer for anyone who wanted to delve into late medieval mysticism emerging in the fourteenth century Germany, England, and the Netherlands (Osuna 1527). The premise was that God dwells at the core of every human being and that loving intimacy with the Divine can be achieved in one’s earthly life through a process of self-denial and inner, silent prayer. While Osuna’s text on mysticism and the practice of silent prayer gave rise to much controversy, it remained one of Teresa’s sources of learning. Be that as it might, Teresa entertained converso interlocutors, many of them well-read and endowed with different Ecclesiastic positions and updated in religious trends and polemics, as was the case with Fray Luis de León who showed much interest in her writings although they never met. Such contacts reinforce the assumption that she was probably well aware of her own Jewish and converso origins, a key biographical detail that tends to be silenced according to the interests at stake in different historical conjunctures.

Teresa’s difficult health conditions throughout her life were a disadvantage that she transformed into an asset to further pursue her intellectual as well as her monastic and public life. In 1555, on a special feast day, Teresa underwent a ‘spiritual/mental fit and later rebirth’, provoked because of the nun’s confrontation with an image of the suffering Christ of the passion, wounded and bleeding. Quite daringly, Teresa soon compared her overwhelming experience to that of Saint Augustine (354–430), in his autobiographical Confessions. While never trained in scholastic theology and classic terminology, Teresa devised a new vocabulary (e.g., union, rapture, elevation fight of the spirit, ecstasy) to describe what she sensed were her unmediated mystical encounters with the Divine (Eire 2019, p. 10). Unsurprisingly, her evolving mystic turn and her growing popularity inside and outside the Convent life brought disapproval from her male confessors. The controversies reached a climax when she first experienced the “transverberation” or wounding that resulted in a vision and experience of ecstasy (Santa Teresa de Jesús [1967] 2021, pp. 263–70; Eire 2019, p. 22).

With the passage of time and not without disputes or intrigues, Teresa, the physically fragile nun, turned into a new and ever more significant player in the matters of the devoted soul. As Eire rightly puts it, Teresa became increasingly relevant by writing about herself, about her life of prayer, and her efforts to reform the Carmelite order. For Eire, her simultaneous development as a mystic, writer, and religious reformer provides the tools to best interpret her life and oeuvre. This is especially true of her autobiography, later named Vida de la Madre Teresa de Jesús y algunas de las mercedes que Dios le hizo, escrita por ella misma por mandado de su confesor, a quien envía y dirige, written at Avila between 1560 and 1565, but published posthumously by Fray Luis de León in 1588.

Critical analysis of Teresa’s Vida renders it the result of a forced, judicial confession. Teresa wrote her autobiography because she was commanded to do so by the clerics who served as her confessors and spiritual advisors. Hence, Eire defines this work not so much as an autobiography but as a defence of Teresa’s orthodoxy and of the genuine divine origin of her mystical experiences. In turn, Gillian Ahlgren criticizes Teresa’s biographers, who relied too heavily on the explanations offered in Vida. By outlining the historical and mental framework of the 16th century in which Teresa lived, Ahlgren notes that Teresa’s work and activities outside the convent constituted acts of resistance against the patriarchal and authoritarian aspects of the Counter-Reformation. This is revealed in Teresa’s combative effort to claim theological authority for women, laying out her specific strategies in her most important works: Vida and Camino de la perfección (Ahlgren 1996). The latter, published in 1566 and written at the advice of her counsellors, is a how-to guide that teaches her nuns how to deepen their prayer life amid the spread of the Reformation. Considering it a “living book” aimed at guiding the spiritual growth of the Carmelites, Teresa outlines four stages of prayer—meditation, silence, repose of the soul, and perfect union with God—which she compares to rapture. El Castillo Interior o Las Moradas, written in 1577 but published also after her death in 1588, outlines the ideal journey of faith. Teresa’s piece compares the contemplative soul to a castle with seven inner chambers, symbolizing stages of spiritual growth. Inspired by a vision of the soul as a diamond-shaped castle, she describes this path as leading to ultimate union with God.

For Ahlgren, Teresa’s statements that she wrote her works at the behest of her confessors or that they were meant specifically for the Carmelite nuns are merely rhetorical pretexts to gain the right to write. Thus, Teresa’s rhetorical markers of humility and obedience appear as disruptive means to gain her own voice and theological authority.

Through the comparison of the different existing versions of Camino de la perfección, Ahlgren illustrates both the mechanisms of censorship and the transformations in Teresa’s consciousness (Ahlgren 1996). Although at first Teresa repeatedly emphasizes her inferiority and incapacity, she ultimately claims the legitimacy of women’s spiritual formation. Among her rhetorical devices, irony and boldness in presenting herself as the mediator of God’s voice stand out.

In any case, Teresa’s recognition as a mystic by the 1550s had prompted religious suspicion in a haunted Spanish society and a severe response on behalf the Inquisition. The strong reaction was also due to the Protestant networks that had been discovered in Seville and Valladolid. Indeed, an index of forbidden books, together with vernacular devotional texts, many of which had influenced Teresa, were harshly censored. Given this oppressive climate, Teresa’s writings were supposed to survey her inner religious life and mystical claims. Being monitored as either a fraud that invented mystical experiences and challenged the orthodoxy or as an enlightened nun who truly engaged with the Divine made Teresa craft her writing with great caution, ensuring that she did not attract accusations of heresy while affirming her spiritual authority. Undoubtedly, in the case of Vida, Teresa’s autobiography resulted in a multivocal and multilayered text, even if it remained apologetic, with a very specific purpose in mind, and was directed to a very select audience.9

As Ahlgren reminds us, after the Council of Trent (1545–63), women were excluded to an extreme degree from public life and from access to official institutions. The exclusion was reinforced by the Index of Valdés, also known as Index of Forbidden Books. An effective tool of ideological control by the Inquisition, the Index, written in 1551 and revised in 1559 by Fernando de Valdés y Salas, barred women from reading theological texts in Latin, while allowing moralist treatises on female education in the vernacular (Ahlgren 1995). As a result, a new ideal model of womanhood based on concepts such as humility and obedience and that cloistered nuns in convents, became the rule.

These increasing limitations, certainly an omen of Teresa’s own reform agenda, were present when she crafted a text known as Fundaciones, that presents the materialization of her reforming efforts and details the establishment of the Discalced Carmelite order in Spain. There, she also tells readers how she profusely travelled Castile and Andalusia, establishing seventeen Discalced Carmelite Convents against constant local opposition, while even launching a similar enterprise among male Carmelites against even stronger opposition. On top of that, Teresa wrote poems, meditations, instructions, and hundreds of letters. She died on 4 October 1582 at the Discalced Carmelite Convent she had founded in Alba de Tormes, at the estate of the Duke of Alba.

Teresa’s life, often framed as a teleological, and even coherent spiritual journey, invites scrutiny through Pierre Bourdieu’s critique of the “biographical illusion”. Bourdieu challenges the tendency to impose artificial order onto inherently fragmented human lives, reducing them to linear narratives that obscure contradictions and discontinuities. Biographies, in his view, are social constructs shaped by cultural norms and linguistic markets, where the authority of members within pertinent speech communities influences credibility and impact more than veracity. Following Bourdieu (2000), our analysis assumes that life stories and their aftermath, especially in the case of highly transcending public figures as was the case of Teresa de Ávila, are the result of tensions, rivalries, and negotiations among multiple narrators. These processes are endlessly influenced by power dynamics, institutional positionings, and field struggles in different realms (be them class, ethnic, racial, racial, religious, cultural, gender, local, national, or transnational) that risk distorting authentic self-representation by aligning personal histories with dominant interpretive frameworks. Hence, Teresa de Ávila, as she came to be known, and her legacy constitute no simple ‘individual journey of sanctity’ but a product of historical forces and narrative conventions that have been molding how her life is told and understood.10 Recognizing this constructed nature urges a reflexive approach to life histories in general and that of Teresa in particular, one that acknowledges both the agency and constraints shaping identity over time.

And while at the center of deep ecclesiastical controversy also after her death, the figure of Teresa de Ávila that was disdained by many, and even described as a restless wanderer, disobedient, and stubborn femina who, under the spell of devotion, invented bad doctrines, moving outside the cloister against the rules of the Council of Trent and the Counter-Reformation dominant in Spain, she was against all odds, ‘turned into’ the sacred nun who transformed the Carmelite Orders of both women and men that led eventually to the establishment of the Discalced Carmelites in 1580.

2.2. The Ávila of Teresa

We cannot fully grasp Teresa’s trajectory, her writings, the significance of her later Carmelite monastic reforms, nor the forces behind the construction of her “biographical illusion” (that may be appealing to diverse audiences which, to the present day, engage in different forms of appropriation for different fields and agendas from linguistics, through feminism as was the study of and up to arts, psychoanalysis, and erotism) (e.g., Weber 1990; Kristeva 1995) without understanding the cultural milieu of the city in which she lived and worked.

Jody Bilinkoff’s study of the social history of Avila, which begins following Isabel la Católica (herself an abulense) assuming the throne of Castilla-León, and concludes in 1620, prior to the canonization of Teresa, offers a most documented analysis. In that period, Avila experienced years of abundance followed by a precipitate decline in its fortunes. The historical forces that reshaped the city brought a burgeoning economy that was then moving away from the landed aristocracy to a newly grown middle class. Indeed, Avila prospered because of the wool trade that allowed artisans, merchants, and other workers who began deriving their income from the manufacture and sale of woollen cloth that gave them economic prosperity. The aristocracy who remained at the pinnacle of the local social hierarchy kept its status thanks to their accumulated wealth, which allowed them to support and maintain the growth of religious foundations in the city.

Since the Middle Ages, the concept of a foundation began to take shape as an institution constituted by a pool of assets that the founders allocated to works of mercy. Either the Church created foundations for pious purposes or directed those created by the faithful (generally the rich) who were also pursuing such aims, understanding these as activities and works inherent to the Church’s mission. In the Ávila of early modern Spain, these foundations often constituted monastic fiefdoms in which the activities of nuns or monks centered on prayers and masses for the (noble or aristocratic) patron’s soul and the souls of his family. The pervasive control exercised by the aristocracy within the monasteries mirrored that which they wielded in secular society as well. The rise of new cadres of personas ricas, or “new men”, as a novel force in the economic, social, and political life of the city came hand in hand with Avila’s prosperity. In turn, urban problems increased, including overcrowding, public health concerns, and a need for civic improvements. It was in this context that the motivation of the non-noble “new men”, many of whom came from converso backgrounds, was to have an impact on their surroundings. Such motivation was twofold. On the one hand, civic-mindedness, good business sense, and religious fervor explained their willingness to have a say in social and civic issues and concerns. On the other, the opportunity to better themselves socially by entering the ranks of the nontaxpaying hidalguía was equally compelling. Certainly, the above helps understand and trace the pleito de hidalguia of the men of the Cepeda family, that is, Teresa’s grandparent, father, and uncles who combined their beneficence with their aspirations for the honors and privileges of the petty nobility (Egido 1986). The aspirations of these “new men” ran parallel with religious reform movements of the sixteenth century that emphasized personal spirituality and good works.

When Teresa de Cepeda entered the monastery of La Encarnacion outside the walls of Avila, she enjoyed a lifestyle very similar to that of a well-to-do lady in the outside society. Daughters of aristocrats and personas ricas enjoyed the comforts, servants, and prerogatives rich women in upper echelons entertained. It was against this permissive and material life that Teresa began to weave her reform. But she was not the only one. Jody Bilinkoff reminds us of other religious reformers in Avila and elsewhere, whose ideas and practices helped to structure the reforms Teresa proposed. The works of the newly formed religious orders such as Society of Jesus under Ignatius of Loyola, the preaching of Juan de la Cruz, or the popularity of beatas or holy women as studied by Ahlgren are pivotal in understanding the landscape of Spanish mysticism and spirituality during the ‘religiously innovative’ sixteenth century. In the case of Loyola, his impetus for reform as expressed in his “Spiritual Exercises” presents contemplative prayer, and renewed spirituality through personal transformation and community work as a return to authentic Christian practices. Above all, his “Spiritual Exercises” served as a well-designed method for meditation, prayer, and contemplation that facilitated a deeper connection with God, individual engaging in rigorous self-examination and spiritual reflection. Undoubtedly, these demands for reform, that equally address the religious life of the community and its social needs, created a climate favorable to Teresa’s eventual reforms. Still, the implications of some of her proposals clashed sharply with previous practices. Bilinkoff shows how Teresa’s insistence on poverty for her foundations, her forswearing of titles, dowries, and honras, and her emphasis on mental rather than vocal prayer challenged the status quo of aristocratically endowed monasteries of the time while her views appealed to conversos like herself who embraced the discalced reform.

2.3. The Politics of Sanctity

Following the Council of Trent, new procedures for beatification and canonization were established. Teresa of Avila would be among the first to undergo the novel process. Pope Pius V declared Teresa beatified in 1614 and her official sainthood led by Pope Gregory took place in 1622. Her canonization took place alongside other significant figures of the Catholic Reformation such as Ignatius of Loyola. Different scholars have thoroughly unleashed the politics behind this apparently smooth process. Gillian Ahlgren rightly brought to the fore a much-needed gender perspective (Ahlgren 1995, 1996) while focusing on what she sees as the incongruity between the real life of Teresa of Ávila and the posthumous image of the humble Saint. In so doing, she emphasized the historical context of the Counter-Reformation and its “gender-gap”. That is, the different implications for women and men at a time when male saints outnumbered female saints, in a ratio of four to one.

Ahlgren argues that the canonization of Teresa of Avila “effected an ironic shift in the cultural acceptance of this woman”. In other words, Teresa became instrumental to the Roman Church, which propagated its own gender ideology, by establishing the limits within which women’s sanctity was defined. In so doing, the Church set a posthumously reconstructed Teresa whose piety, humility, and obedience were deemed exemplary but whose independence and spiritual authority were affirmed as exceptional qualities based on divine favors not to be emulated by or expected of other women. Hence, the transformation of Teresa de Jesus into Saint Teresa was rewritten “so that it became a role model for Catholic women acceptable to Counter-Reformation orthodoxy” (Ahlgren 1996, p. 148).

Nevertheless, the posthumous debate by the Inquisition and the canonization process by the Catholic Church reveal the strategies of detractors and critics who never tried to understand Teresa’s work within its context, accusing her of contravening the natural order. Her defenders, such as Luis de León, fought to include her in the mystical tradition of Spain. In any case, the canonization process became an effective propaganda tool for the Catholic Church. Thus, it seems that Teresa’s rhetoric of humility ceased to be a clever survival strategy in a dangerous climate and instead served as a suitable means in the struggle for her recognition as a saint of the Church.

With her consecration as a “Saint”, Teresa the mystical writer was reduced to an abstract model of the ideal Counter-Reformation woman. Even though Teresa consistently fought for female autonomy within the restrictive context of the Counter-Reformation, she ultimately became a key figure in reinforcing the Catholic Church’s gender ideology—one that conceals both the mechanisms of Inquisition censorship and the strategies governing acceptable content in the canonization process.

With a strong emphasis on the simultaneous tensions produced not only by gender bias but also by politics, by the rivalries between center (Castille) and peripheries (the regions as Galicia), the authority of the crown versus that of the Church, and the struggles between traditionalist against reformists, Erin Kathleen Rowe studied the controversy prompted by attempts to proclaim Saint Teresa of Avila the co-patron saint of Spain alongside its traditional patron Saint James the Greater (Santiago) in the early seventeenth century (Rowe 2011). The dual patronage rivalry reflects the struggle between traditionalists (santiaguistas) and reformists (teresianos) over the future direction of Spain at a time of acute political and economic crisis. Supporters of the sole patronage of Saint James, popularly known as the “Moor slayer” during the medieval Reconquest, were headed by the archbishop and chapter of Santiago de Compostela, who emphasized his symbolic role in defending Spain’s Christian tradition against the Moorish enemy. In favor of Teresa’s inclusion were the Castilian Cortes, Philip IV and his first minister, the Count-Duke of Olivares, and the Carmelite order, who stressed her effective protection against Protestant heresy, her dedication to Catholic reform, and her capacity to safeguard Spain through spiritual intercession. Teresa’s native origins also counted in placing her in a favorable position as opposed to James, the foreign apostle, to represent Spain. But there was much more than that. The monarch viewed the co-patronage campaign as instrumental to reinforcing his power. In turn, supporters of Santiago, the king’s and his first minister’s attempt to challenge the apostle’s status as sole patron, seeing such move as a threat to ecclesiastical immunity. The issue of gender was also present, invoked by both parties to favor their chosen candidate. Teresianos portrayed their female candidate as a more spiritual and benevolent patron. Santiaguistas rejected the female patron sainthood, claiming it was a form of effeminate humiliation that would weaken the reputation of the monarchy and lead to an undermining of its authority on the international level. Tensions between the center and periphery also mattered. The devotion to Saint James—as the universal patron of Spain—tied the northern cities and regions of Old Castile. Support for Teresa—an exclusively Castilian patron—found most favor in the more central areas where the Carmelites had a strong presence, including Ávila, Salamanca, and Valladolid. In the end, it was Pope Urban VIII who in 1629 nullified Teresa’s co-patronage and restored Saint James to his former status. This decision reasserted papal jurisdiction over national patron sainthood, at the expense of a rebuke to Philip IV for overstepping his powers and invoking the cult of saints for his own secular purposes.11

The varied and complex ways saints and sanctity are instrumentalized may give a rather simplistic understanding that they are utilized during historical periods of embattled faith. Yet as Rowe reveals, saints and the battle between the saints, placed in the broader context of court politics, gender roles, geography, myths, and nation-building, shed light on the relationship between patron sainthood and politics. Simon Ditchfield, who studied how saints derided by Protestants were, at the same time, presented as a source of anxiety, tension, or unease for Catholics, offers a critical analysis of the constructions of saints and to what extent the processes of saint-making share striking parallels with the making of heretic profiles, especially in the context of the Roman Inquisition’s direct involvement in both (Ditchfield 2009) This insightful point is pertinent to understand the instances that made it possible to transform the figure of Teresa de Avila with proven converso origins into Santa Teresa de Jesús at the twilight of Baroque Spain.

3. Teresa de Ávila as Resilient Icon: Appropriation as Policy in Modern and Contemporary Spain

The expulsion of non-Christian religious minorities—the Jews in 1492 and the Muslims soon after, along with the subsequent repression of Protestants—reinforced the idea of Spain as a Christian monarchy. As Catholicism became inseparable from governance, it shaped diplomacy under Charles V and Spain’s cultural and intellectual isolation under Philip II’s anti-Reformation policies. Furthermore, Philip IV’s aborted attempt to advance Saint Teresa’s nomination as co-patron of Spain did not change the strong identification between monarchy and Church as a marker of the Hapsburg kings. However, an initial reception of the Enlightenment eased by the arrival of the French Bourbon to Spain in the 18th century, and with it a novel cadre of intellectuals, made clear the need for political and economic reforms to successfully integrate Spain with the rest of Europe. The manoeuvre required disentangling religion from governance. Certainly, the challenge lay in how to reconcile transformative projects with a long standing Catholic political culture that permeated institutions, social perceptions, and intellectual frameworks, even among reformist thinkers, who themselves remained devout Catholics.

The echoes of the French Revolution in Iberia intensified these tensions because its secular and revolutionary ideals were perceived in the Peninsula as an existential threat to Spain’s Catholic identity. Furthermore, the French invasion to pain in 1808 and the cruel war against Napoleonic France only helped solidify traditionalist Catholic thought, which positioned itself as the guardian of a conservative national integrity against what was seen as an atheistic invader and menace. Hence, the initial construction of the liberal state in 19th-century Spain that the Napoleonic forces in Spain unleashed was marked by conflict, particularly between the Catholic Church and liberal political forces (Álvarez Junco 2001).

Fear of this conflict influenced Spain’s first constitutional framework in 1812. While affirming national sovereignty, the premature 1812 Constitution retained Catholicism as a central pillar of a new political identity. Hence, the notion of Spain as a “Catholic nation” that linked religious belief with political belonging, and that effectively excluded non-Catholics from full citizenship, also remained and permeated the constitutional texts that were later proposed. Despite the liberal challenges coming from different sectors and regions to advance a non-religious nation-sate, the clerical and absolutist forces present in 19th-century Spain consistently opposed secularization, ensuring Catholicism as an essential pillar of both national identity and political life in Spain. Indeed, the more modern Church–State conflict represented two opposing worldviews, and political discourses extended well beyond the end of the 19th century. The conflict unfolded as both a cultural war and military confrontation. In other words, the idea of the Spanish nation, and with it, particular understandings of Spanish National Catholicism (as opposed to liberal/secular narratives of the Spanish nation), unfolded, evolved, and manifested throughout the 19th century till nowadays within a wide range of commemorations.12

Public commemorative celebrations are instrumental platforms to reenact so-called ‘essential’ features of the Spanish nation and Spanish nationalist myths. The Reconquista, the discovery of America, Miguel de Cervantes, the War of Independence, and the cultural hegemony of Castile and Castilian language, capable of sacralizing symbolic landscapes such as Covadonga, Toledo, or El Escorial, are cases in point. The commemoration of saints’ centennials within Spanish Catholicism, honoring religious heritage and figures, as has been the case with Saint Teresa, shares with the former not only their fostering of national and or community cohesion and regional/local identity, but also their being tools to reinforce the existing power structures, and to perpetuate historical narratives that can easily marginalize non-hegemonic and heterodox groups, while obscuring the complexities of the historical periods, events, and figures commemorated, thus erasing disruptive facts and counter ideologies.13 As such, they always remain arenas of contestation over memory.14

3.1. Teresa de Ávila in the Era of Commemorations

While the appropriation of Saint Teresa of Ávila by Spanish National Catholicism had been a long process, forged in an earlier time, the third centenary of her death in 1882 served as an ideal occasion to recast her to the world as a heroine of the Counter-Reformation and as a native treasure and symbol of Spain. Rendering Saint Teresa as a core value to promote Spain’s international stance ran parallel to her intense nationalization, as a symbol of Spanish identity. An identity that rested upon two indissoluble hallmarks: Hispanidad or Spanishness and Catholicism. According to Dupont (2012), Saint Teresa constituted “the perfect transitional figure, being a central player in both worldviews” towards the end of the 19th century when nationalism was on the rise and religious thinking was in decline.

A Spanish turn-of-the-twentieth-century generation of intellectual figures, writers and scholars, from Miguel de Unamuno (Unamuno 1909) through Emilia Pardo Bazán (Pardo Bazán 1925) to Américo Castro (Castro 1929), were also enchanted by the figure of Teresa, offering literary treatments and existential engagements with the saint. Intentionally or not, their interest became a useful tool to advance the popularization and nationalization of Catholicism, by then rendered as a modernist fascination with saintly heroes, especially at a time when Spain was losing the religious battle against science, yet there remained still a nostalgia for faith and miracles (Dupont 2012; Lloren, forthcoming).

It was against this backdrop that the 1922 commemoration of the 300-year anniversary of Teresa of Ávila’s canonization that involved a number of events, prestigious ecclesiastical figures, and institutions in Spain can be better interpreted. A major meeting, the International Congress on Saint Teresa of Ávila that took place in Ávila, intertwined with the canonization of another prominent Spanish mystic, Saint John of the Cross, Teresa’s close friend and spiritual partner. This dual celebration added to the significance of the events, bringing together scholars, theologians, and experts in her life and writings. Among them was the acknowledged theologian and philosopher Jacques Maritain, who was meant to examine her works, mysticism, and innovations in Catholicism. In a similar vein, religious celebrations and processions were orchestrated in the Carmelite Convent where Saint Teresa lived. The Jubilations were sealed by authoritative publications, and special editions of her writings, meant to reach a broader audience, were orchestrated. The commemorations were endorsed by the Spanish government, the Ministry of Culture, Education, and Religious Affairs and had the blessings of King Alfonso XIII.15

As Giuliana Di Febo has stressed, during the third centenary of her canonization, the saint became the definitive emblem of the principal Hispanic myths—of counter-reformational and patriotic Catholicism, and of the linguistic and religious centrality of Castile—which consolidated her figure as the stereotypical “Saint of the People” and the symbol of Hispanidad (Di Febo 1988, p. 79; Martín 2020, pp. 282–86).

3.2. Saint Teresa as Patron of the Sección Femenina de la Falange

During the new period inaugurated by an apparently secular Spanish Second Republic in 1931, the new regime failed to eliminate imagery and narratives drawn from the traditional religious symbolic world that still dominate communal ritual life. Catholicism remained deeply entwined with national identity. Santa Teresa, monopolized by Catholic conservatism, was given a transcendental gender dimension, thereby giving rise to a Catholic and conservative feminism that countered an emerging secular feminism that proclaimed the ideal of the modern woman. The latter envisioned the potential for a transformation of gender relations in clear dialogue with the liberal and left-wing sectors now empowered by the new Republic. It is no wonder that the resulting conservative feminism was deployed against Republican reforms, which were presented as clear attacks on the true feminine nature and its natural environment, the family. Hence, it came as no surprise when the figure of Santa Teresa was declared the Patron of the Sección Femenina de la Falange y de las JONS, the women’s branch of the Falange political movement (Ofer 2009). Indeed, already consecrated as “Santa de la Raza”, Teresa de Avila became the undisputable feminine icon of the so-called “Spanish Crusade”, the propagandistic slogan which General Francisco Franco implemented, with the complete approval of the Spanish Catholic Church, to recast in a pseudo-theological narrative the rebellion he and his followers had initiated against the Spanish Second Republic in July 1936.

The mural of Santa Teresa that Josep Lluís Sert designed for the Spanish Pavilion at the famous Paris Exposition in 1937, inaugurated at the first year of the Spanish Civil War, contributed decisively to the recognition that the Vatican granted to Franco and that came hand in hand with the support he received from a broad range of international Catholic sectors (Basilio 2013, p. 174).

In his frantic search for legitimacy, General Franco assigned Santa Teresa the role of religious patronage, abusing her image to impose a fascist ideal of Nationalist and Catholic femininity (Lloren, forthcoming). The latter functions as an effective tool to encourage the mobilization of women on the rebel side yet under a strict moral code delimiting female behavior. Paradoxically, Catholic fundamentalism embraced Santa Teresa’s figure, despite her Jewish and converso ethnic origins and the spiritual heterodoxy of her ideas. Even more so, the recovery of Santa Teresa’s left hand (encased in a silver reliquary) during the occupation of the province of Malaga by Franco’s troops in February 1937 was inscribed in the “miraculous” interpretation of the war, which explained the nationalists’ victories as the results of divine protection (Di Febo 1988). The circumstances generated an emotional yet grotesque link between Franco and the image of Santa Teresa, which reinforced the definitive appropriation of her figure by National Catholicism. While remaining a pillar of Francoist National Catholicism, Rome also nurtured her figure and Pope Paul VI raised Teresa to the exalted rank of “doctor of the church” in 1970— one of the first two women ever to be so honored.

In turn, the Spanish academy timidly began to investigate the Jewish-converted origins of Teresa de Ávila at a rather late stage. It was Father Teofanes Egido, a professor of history at the University of Valladolid and himself a member of the Discalced Carmelite Order, who paid notice that by 1940s, another researcher, Alonso Cortés had uncovered a 16th century lawsuit containing clear testimony that Saint Teresa’s father and her father’s father had been Jews who converted to Catholicism (Alonso Cortés 1946). However, these documents did not launch any deep revision until much later, when a new wave of historiographic revisions and reinterpretations of Teresa’s lineage began to appear (Egido 1982, 1986, 2015a, 2015b; Herranz Velázquez 2017). These rather late-coming reviews parallel the closed ecclesiastic debate of Saint Teresa of Ávila, that still reflects a hagiographic perspective as this is clearly seen in the proceedings of the Congreso Interuniversitario “Santa Teresa de Jesús, Maestra de Vida”, that took place at the Universidad Católica de Ávila in 2015 (Pérez Cuenca et al. 2015). Beyond the profuse yet still much circumscribed debate on the figure of saint in the Spanish academy, or more recent studies of her representation in Spanish filmography (Lorente and Carriba 2015), non-Spanish scholars’ interests in Teresa de Ávila’s authorship and public persona have grown exponentially, many highlighting and elaborating not only the complexities of her converso origins but the transgressive and revolutionary aspects of both her writing and activism then and in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.16

3.3. Saint Teresa as Public History

By 1982, the Spanish State TV was still at its infancy. Josefina Molina, considered nowadays one of Spain’s most accomplished female TV and film directors, had been called for a major TV production. Together with a group of young TV colleagues who had in mind the creation of an engaged Public TV that would serve the interests of a new democratic Spanish State rather than a specific government, they took upon themselves the responsibility of making a series on the figure of Teresa de Ávila.

Molina had come across the Saint as a child when she was under the tutelage of the Monjas Escolaspias at the Colegio de Santa Victoria de Córdoba. There she saw estampitas with different images of Saint Teresa and learned of her poetry and excerpts of Vida. As expressed in numerous interviews, Molina knew that assuming the direction of the series meant that she was going to be scrupulously examined by the Catholic Church, the academy, and the popular classes. Thus, she thoroughly prepared herself and others for the demanding enterprise. As she later admitted, Molina viewed the task of the new State TV as a public tool to educate and inspire conscious and egalitarian citizens. Recreating the figure Teresa as an exemplary life for Molina served such an enlightening target. In her opinion, Teresa’s sanctification and later consecration as Doctor of the Church were not to remain the sole patrimony of Catholics and the Church in Spain but had to be shared with the whole world (Molina 2014). Well aware of the anger of the Spanish Church with Gral. Franco, who had taken the Saint’s Brazo Incorrupto as a relic to signal the Nationalist victory all over Spain, Molina sensed it was during the difficult transition to democracy that the right moment had come for a rapprochement of the Spanish and world public with Teresa. Undoubtedly, after Francoism and its discontent, the more democratic RTVE of the early eighties sought to present itself as a vehicle of public history: as a legitimate bearer of historical knowledge.

In that respect, Molina’s series on the figure of Teresa de Ávila falls into what Palacio Arranz (2001, pp. 63–66) calls the “pedagogy of RTVE” during the transition. That is, the attempt to use prestigious fiction, recreated in authentic locations, to explore privileged moments of Spain’s past, while attending to the needs of a democratic present. Molina chose Victor García de la Concha, a scholar from Salamanca and author of El arte literario de Santa Teresa (García de la Concha 1978), as expert and the acknowledged Carmen Martín Gaite as script writer. Likewise, she chose the well-researched Catholic oriented Tiempo y vida de Santa Teresa—written by Father Efrén de la Madre de Dios and Otger Steggink (Efrén de la Madre de Dios and Steggink 1968)—and Rosa Rossi’s Teresa d’Avila. Biografia di una scrittrice as reference books (Rossi 1983).17

The narrative and visual style of the series, within the classic tradition of biographical cinema, had intelligent and careful dialogues even when it kept strong ‘hagiographic’ overtones. The initial sequence present in all the four chapters began with a long shot seen from afar, that reflects the shadow of Avila’s famous wall. Yet the impressive wall that has no less than 87 towers leads viewers to the life and figure of Teresa as she had already entered her first convent but returned home to recover from illnesses. By initiating the series with an adult Teresa, the audience is deprived of learning about her family, her siblings, and her father’s and grandfather’s ethnic and religious origins and of a possible impact on the highly sensitive and intellectually curious protagonist. Nor is Teresa’s converso origin mentioned until much later in the series, suggesting an almost null genealogy impact on her life and work. Instead, frequent and long shots of a winter landscape and architecture suggest that the Castilian climatic, material, and geographic environments were the most decisive factors delineating the protagonist’s thought and destiny. In turn, Molina’s representation of Teresa’s mystic visions (starting in the 3rd chapter) that are hesitant and circumspect are uncritically weaved with Teresa’s dialogues with her confessors, an approach that simplifies the probably intimidating nature of her superiors even if Teresa is allowed a very direct comment on the burning of her books by the Inquisition (she sardonically suggests to the unfriendly Teodora to “have fun” with the spectacle of the flames) (Smith 2011).18 The second half of the series, that presents Teresa’s reform of the Carmelites a dangerous balance between innovation and tradition, results in a procedure that responds to the convention of the biographical film where innovation inevitably leads to the constitution of a new tradition. The audience is given elements to review the Saint in terms of elective affinities with a democratizing Spain and its increasingly secular transition.

Indeed, Molina renders a Teresa that is clearly feminist and anti-racist. Yet the series that is very attentive to historical accuracy (demonstrated by the frequent titles indicating dates and places) is equally respectful of the Catholic subtext pertaining to a religious public (as confirmed by the exciting events that accompany Teresa’s visions). Likewise, the suffering of the physical body of the Saint, presented in the first chapter and constantly remined all throughout the series until the prolonged death scene in the end, clearly responds to the cinematographic tradition of “the woman ennobled by suffering” with its focus on “the disease-ravaged female body”, and is, in itself, a frequent televisual format that perfectly converses with the construction of sanctity. On the other hand, the emphasis on Teresa’s physical and daily work, notwithstanding her spiritual vocation, points to the attempt of Molina’s and Teresa’s interpreter, Concha Velasco, to endow Saint Teresa with a certain “populism” and ‘egalitarianism of representation,’ typical of TV conventions even when the filming of the series of Teresa had so many debts to the model of the consecrated biographical cinema (Smith 2011).

More than two decades later, in 2006, a DVD of the series was released under the rubric of ‘Classic series commemorative editions’, that also included a series on Cervantes dating from 1980. These classic editions commemorated fifty years of existence of RTVE, the Spanish Television production company initiated in 1956 during Francoist Spain. The election responded to the series being among “the best work in the history of our television”, and in themselves “marking a historical moment” (Molina 2014).

In a 2014 public lecture at the BNE, the National Library of Spain, in Madrid, a year prior to the fourth hundred anniversary of Teresa de Avila’s birth, Molina consented that her aim in doing the film had been “to dramatize in images the biography of a real person” within the genre of historical cinema or cine de época, technically referred to as biopic. Her intention had been to portray a “complex period when the tension between Catholicism and Protestantism reached a climax”. Quite surprisingly, throughout the series, there were no references to the persecution polices against Jews or Muslims, their expulsion, and ethnic cleansing. Notwithstanding the seriousness of Molina’s approach to her demanding project, in the early 1980s, it is significant that almost forty years later she still considered “delving into Teresa’s childhood and formative years as a waste of time” (Molina 2014). Clearly, assuming such a stance meant leaving aside questions pertaining her converso origins and the dualities of a converso status in 16th-century Spain. Molina does not address the conversos’ fear of persecution, nor the dualities or ambiguities such status conveyed at a time of religious persecution (García-Arenal 2013; Pastore 2024). Equally absent is the probable trauma her father and paternal grandfather probably experienced by being forced to wear the sambenito in the streets of Toledo, not an infrequent humiliation experienced by converso networks who had to make do with the malice of the Spanish Inquisition. Even when Molina admits that hers was not a PhD investigation but rather a kind of educating entertainment, her treatment of Teresa does not dwell on Teresa’s nor her family’s being in the world under panoptic surveillance. Hence, Molina’s resulting glorification of Teresa, both as a woman and as a religious/social activist who founded the order of Discalced women and men, establishing no less than 17 convents, erases these deep yet basic pending issues.

4. Final Observations

Between March and May 2015, the BNE (National Library of Spain) presented the exhibition Teresa de Jesús: The proof of my truth, to celebrate the quincentennial birth of Saint Teresa. Emphasizing Teresa’s love of reading, the exhibition focused as much on the books she read and cited as on her own and priceless manuscripts, written in her own handwriting. Despite this textual emphasis, the National Library’s exhibition did not fail to highlight the visual dimension of the Saint’s legacy. Therefore, the organizers drew attention not only towards the interest in images characteristic of the Teresian text, but also towards the rich tradition of paintings, engravings, and statues later inspired by her. The humble cell of the Saint was rebuilt in life size for the exhibition. There was a doll in the cell dressed in a meticulous recreation of the Carmelite habit, an attire that Teresa herself described in a text that was displayed next to it. The opening of the exhibition was attended by the then Vice-president and Minister of the Presidency, Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría, representing the right wing Spanish Popular Party. She shared the stage with the newly appointed Felipe VI, as King of Spain, and the exhibition curators, Juan Dobado, himself a Discalced Carmelite priest, theologian, and expert on the life and works, and Rosa Navarro, an acknowledged academician and philologist. The highly conservative mise-en-scène had Acción Cultural Española, a public entity in charge of soft-power diplomacy and cultural entrepreneurship inside and outside Spain, as co-sponsor of the show and its commemorative catalogue with the BNE (See Navarro Durán et al. 2015; Biblioteca Nacional de España and Acción Cultural Española 2015).

Surprisingly or not, this major exhibition and its documented catalogue paid no attention to the historical Teresa de Ávila in relation to the complexities of the converso phenomena, nor to converso’s constraints of being in the world. Far from it, the highly ceremonial rituals and politics of visual display of the manuscripts and other items exhibited reinforced a pseudo-sanctified aura, much more in dialogue with a claustrophobic Baroque Spain than with a distanced and more balanced critical gaze of what Teresa de Ávila as a historic-cultural, sociological, and literary phenomena represents.