Cartas desde el convento. Modelos epistolares femeninos en la España de la Contrarreforma

Abstract

Convents in the early modern period were, as is widely known, a privileged space for women’s writing especially with regard to epistolary activity. Taking into consideration the main features of this written production and the nuns’ writing culture, this essay compares the letters of Teresa de Jesús (Teresa of Ávila) to the correspondence of Sister María de Jesús de Ágreda with King Philip IV. This analysis reveals deeply seated epistolary patterns. On the one hand, the Ávila letters show the daily role played by written communication in the Carmelite reform and the importance of writing for the relationships between nuns within the order. On the other hand, Ágreda’s correspondence with the king is much closer to the profile of the “divine mother”, a profile emphasizing the moral authority played by the nuns, whose spiritual advice was often demanded by kings and other members of the elite.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 10 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.