Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada (1515-82) was born into an aristocratic family in the city of Avila, about 50 miles northwest of Madrid. In 1535, at age twenty, she entered the Carmelite convent of the Incarnation at Avila, taking the monastic name Teresa of Jesus (only after her canonization in 1622 would she be known as “Teresa of Avila”). Like other Carmelites in the sixteenth century, the nuns at the Incarnation observed a “mitigated” or softened version of the order’s original rule, and for two decades Teresa lived an accordingly relaxed and materially comfortable existence. In 1555, however, she experienced a religious awakening that called her towards a more ascetic and meditative life. By 1562 she had secured Pope Pius IV’s approval to open the first convent of the Carmelite Reform, in which she hoped principles of humility and poverty would be more rigorously observed. By the late 1570s Teresa had founded further Reform Carmelite convents, but great controversy often surrounded her work. Central to that work was the idea of mental prayer, which Teresa believed could establish a close personal link between the individual and God. Teresa explored this idea in her many writings, which include letters, poems, and scriptural commentary as well as four longer prose works: the autobiographical Life (written in 1562); The Way of Perfection (written in 1564); The Book of the Foundations (written in 1573 and describing her struggles to found convents); and finally The Interior Castle (written in 1577), widely considered to be the most vivid and fully realized account of this influential mystic’s spiritual method.
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