The Life of Teresa of Jesus
Teresa of Ávila’s account of her own life and prayer, written at the command of her confessors. Its last chapters tell how she founded the convent of St Joseph at Ávila in 1562, the first house of her reform of the Carmelite order.
Teresa says in her prologue that her confessors commanded her to give this account of her way of prayer and of what she took to be the workings of grace in her. It is not a diary. Chapters 32 to 36 narrate the founding of St Joseph’s; in the prologue to her the Book of the Foundations she says that her confessor García of Toledo ordered her to write that history in 1562, the year of the foundation itself. In chapter 32 she speaks of a vision “nearly six years ago”, so that the text as it stands was finished some years after 1562.
The book is the only source for much that it tells, above all for her inner experience, which it reports as she understood it. For outward events, such as the opposition of the city of Ávila and the lawsuit that followed, she is a participant writing within a few years. The editors’ footnotes in the translation linked here, which supply names and dates she leaves out, are later scholarship and are not part of her text.
Cited in
- 24 August 1562, firm date