Spanish · 1515–1582
Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada was the granddaughter of a Toledo Jew forced to recant by the Inquisition, entered a comfortable Carmelite convent in Ávila at twenty, spent twenty years there being sociable and ill, and at about forty had the experiences that turned her into a reformer. She founded seventeen convents of a stricter Carmelite rule, travelling Castile by mule cart, negotiating with bishops, papal nuncios, bankers and hostile townspeople, and was investigated by the Inquisition, which kept a copy of her autobiography for years. She wrote at her confessors' orders, in a fast, colloquial Spanish full of interruptions and jokes, describing states of prayer with the precision of a naturalist. She defended John of the Cross when the Calced Carmelites imprisoned him. She was canonised in 1622 and declared the first woman Doctor of the Church in 1970.