Teresa of Ávila
Spanish Carmelite nun, mystic, writer and reformer (1515–1582), born in Ávila into a family of possible converso Jewish ancestry, who entered the Carmelite convent of Ávila at twenty, partly to escape a conventional marriage, and who, after decades of what she herself described as a lukewarm and inconstant religious life, underwent around the age of forty a profound inner conversion prompted by contemplating an image of the scourged Christ, marking the start of an intense mystical life characterised by ecstatic experiences, visions and the phenomenon known as levitation, documented by contemporary witnesses. Convinced that the Carmelite order had excessively relaxed its original austerity, she undertook, with remarkable determination and organisational skill, the reform of the order, founding seventeen new convents of Discalced Carmelites throughout Spain under a regime of poverty, strict enclosure and intense contemplative prayer, a task in which she was decisively assisted by St John of the Cross, whom she persuaded to extend the reform to the friars as well. Her literary work, written in a Castilian of exceptional vividness and frankness, often at the behest of her confessors and under the suspicious watch of the Inquisition, includes the Book of Her Life, her spiritual autobiography, in which she relates her own mystical journey with remarkable psychological introspection, and above all The Interior Castle (1577), her masterwork, which describes the soul as a crystal castle made up of seven concentric mansions to be traversed in a spiritual progression toward intimate union with God at the centre. Persecuted during her lifetime by inquisitorial suspicion due to her possible Jewish ancestry and the boldness of her reforms and writings, she was canonised in 1622 and proclaimed a Doctor of the Church in 1970, the first woman to receive that title, in recognition of the exceptional theological depth of her mystical work.