The Letters of Teresa of Ávila

Teresa’s letters fill four volumes in the translation linked here. They were written for their recipients and not for publication, and those of 1577 and 1578 show her reporting news as it reached her while the friars and nuns of her reform were in conflict with the rest of the Carmelite order.

Two are cited in this wiki. On 4 December 1577 she wrote to Philip II that friars of the unreformed observance had seized the two Discalced confessors of the convent of the Incarnation at Ávila and were holding them prisoner, and she asked the king to have them freed. A letter of August 1578 to Father Gracián names John of the Cross and describes his nine months in a cell barely large enough to hold him. She writes as a party to the dispute and reports what she had been told. The headings and notes that identify people and places are the translators’.