Introduction

Abstract

Women Religious and Epistolary Exchange in the Carmelite Reform tells the story of the Carmelite expansion beyond the death of Teresa de Jesús, showing how three of her most dynamic disciples, María de San José, Ana de Jesús, and Ana de San Bartolomé, struggled to continue her mission in Portugal, France, and the Low Countries. Like Teresa, these women were prolific letter writers. Catalina de Cristo, a Carmelite nun who never left Spain, also produced a corpus of letters that reveals the distress of those who anxiously waited for news of their sisters abroad. In devoting themselves so assiduously to letter-writing, these women, as Joan Ferrante has shown, were continuing a long monastic tradition that had begun in the Middle Ages.