Abstract

Saint Teresa of Jesus is the most important modern model for feminine religiosity. Nevertheless, in her times, her actions and her persona were under the ecclesiastical hierarchy’s skeptical scrutiny. By means of an analysis of La vida de Santa Teresa de Jesus (1590) by Francisco de Ribera and of one of the many comedies composed for her beatification in 1614, La bienaventurada madre Santa Teresa de Jesús, an apocryphal work by Luis Velez de Guevara, I propose to confi­gure a portrait of the Saint from the point of view of the epoch’s collective imagination. Her configuration in the collective imagination was not always positive.