Teresa de Ávila: Portrait of the saint as a young woman

ABSTRACT

Teresa de Jesús (known as Teresa de Ávila in the English-speaking world) began life in a comfortable, merchant-class family. The daughter and granddaughter of conversos, she was one of twelve children (two from the first marriage of Don Alonso de Cepeda, Teresa's father, and ten from the second). She received a good education for a girl of her period and class, probably learning to read and write from parents and tutors, and then studying at a convent boarding school. She undoubtedly learned the importance of letter writing from her father, as business in early modern Europe was conducted largely through correspondence. Although traditional biographers paint a romanticized view of Teresa's girlhood, a careful reading of her Vida, letters, and other documents reveals that there were many strains on the Cedepa-Ahumada household. Among the causes were the Cepedas' deteriorating financial situation, societal pressures on conversos, the death of Teresa's mother, tensions among the siblings, the departure of Teresa's brothers for the New World, and Teresa's illness.

KEYWORDS:

• Conversos
• early modern education
• Teresa de Ávila's family
• Teresa de Jesús/Teresa de Ávila
• women's education

Notes

1. For example, Casey notes that in seventeenth-century Medina del Campo, despite a high birth rate, forty percent of households had no children, and twenty-five percent had only one (214).

2. Teófanes Egido provides the documentation on Teresa's Jewish ancestry and the conversion of her father and grandfather in El linaje judeoconverso de Santa Teresa.

3. On sumptuary laws in Spain, see Saúl Martínez Bermejo and Alan Hunt. Darcy Donahue discusses clothes and social class in “Dressing Up and Dressing Down: Clothing and Class Identity in the Novelas ejemplares.”

4. Teresa inveighs repeatedly against gossip. In Vida, she writes that an important virtue is to “escusar toda mormuración” (151). In Camino de perfección, she exhorts her nuns: “haceos sorda a las murmuraciones” (OC 747).

5. Baranda reminds us, however, that among peasants, virtually none could read.

6. She says she was “twelve years old or a little less” (Vida 122).

7. Antonio T. de Nicolás has interpreted Teresa's very vague passage as a declaration of guilt and asserts that she “was not a virgin” when she entered the convent (xiv). Victoria Lincoln, while more cautious, reaches the same conclusion (15).

8. See section on Teresa's letters to Lorenzo in Mujica (130–39).