Luisa de Carvajal was a Spanish poet, noblewoman and missionary. She was born in Jaraicejo (Cáceres) in 1566 and died in London in 1614. Assisted by English Jesuits, she had travelled to England in secret in early 1605 in order to do what she could to assist the kingdom's Catholic community. Just months after her arrival, the backlash following the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot drove priests and friars further underground and created a vacuum into which she managed to step. She would minister to London's community of 'recusants' (those Catholics unwilling to sign the Oath of Allegiance to King James), console condemned Catholic clerics, and collect the quartered body parts of executed priests for distribution as relics throughout Europe. She was twice imprisoned, in 1608 and 1613, for her unapologetic and very public profession of her Roman faith. Her death shortly after her second brief period of incarceration led to a campaign for her beatification. She left behind a vast corpus of autograph writings, of which 50 poems, 180 letters, an incomplete Vida/Life (or ‘spiritual autobiography’), various other pieces of spiritual-autobiographical prose, and four written religious vows are extant. The focus of this series of posts will be this collection of four vows, and the focus of this particular post will be to make clear what documents exist and when it was that they were written.
Save for the handful of documents housed in the archive of the College of St Alban in Valladolid, all of Carvajal’s extant manuscripts can be accessed in Madrid. Until recently, these documents were stored in the archive of the Convento de la Encarnación in the city’s historical centre; they are now available for consultation in the Archivo General of the Royal Palace, just a short walk across the Plaza de Oriente. Helpfully, the documents have now been duplicated in microform, which makes them much easier to access and scrutinise. All documents written by Carvajal herself or pertaining to the campaign for her beatification can be found on the following microfilm rolls: 4080, 4112, 4113, 4114, 4123, 4124, 4131 and 4135. Every extant draft of each vow can be found on microfilm number 4080. These consist of:
four drafts of her vow of poverty, to which Carvajal subscribed in 1593;
three drafts of her vow of obedience, which she took in 1595;
three drafts of her vow of ‘greater perfection’, which she originally penned in 1595;
two drafts of her vow of martyrdom, a vow originally taken in 1598.
If the bullet points above seem verbose, it is for a good reason. We know that the years given correspond to the years in which Carvajal first penned and began fully to adhere to the respective vows, and the extant manuscripts bear these same dates. With the possible exception of her vow of martyrdom, however, we do not have available the drafts of the vows written in the years given. Every extant draft of her first three written vows - of poverty, of obedience, and of ‘greater perfection’ - was, in fact, penned after she had taken her curious vow of martyrdom in 1598. This is confirmed by the fact that in the earliest available draft of her first written vow, her vow of poverty, she makes reference to ‘the vow and promise whose sign is the cross’ (‘el voto y promesa cuya señal es la cruz’) - her 1598 vow of martyrdom. All of this amounts to one conclusion: whilst we can accept that these vows were originally penned in 1593 and 1595, the versions of them available to us are representative of their purpose to Carvajal in the period between 1598, when she took her vow of martyrdom, and 1600, when, with the permission of Esteban de Hojeda, rector of Madrid's Jesuit college, she formally dispensed with all four vows. As will become clear, the sum purpose of the vows was to protect her right to discern for herself the will of God, and to be able to live in conformity with what she deemed to be divine providence. Over the course of the drafting and redrafting of her vows, she undertook a subtle and gradual erosion of the authority which her male and, ordinarily, Jesuit superiors held over her.
Another reason for setting out chronologically the extant drafts of the vows - as will be done over the coming posts - is to make clear which is the earliest and which is the most up-to-date draft of each extant vow. This has not always been entirely apparent. In 1626, a Jesuit by the name of Hernando de Espinosa, a long-time confidant of Carvajal’s, submitted a copy of her vows to the campaign for her beatification (see microfilm 4131 of those listed above). Upon inspection of these documents at the Archivo General, it becomes apparent that Espinosa had actually proffered the earliest extant draft of each of the vows. The only appearance of this version of the vows in print, whether wholly or in part, can be found in Camilo María Abad’s devotional biography of Carvajal titled Una misionera española en la Inglaterra del siglo XVII: Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza (1566-1614) (Santander: Universidad Pontificia, 1966). Here, excerpts from the earliest draft of each vow are woven into Abad's narrative at various junctures. A different version of the vows has enjoyed much wider circulation. These first appeared - heavily paraphrased and assimilated into a running commentary - in Michael Walpole’s Spanish-language narrative account of her life (see chapters 20, 21, 37 and 40 of Michael Walpole, La vida de doña Luisa de Carbajal y Mendoça (manuscript, c.1621-24)). As well as being Carvajal’s biographer, Walpole had been her confessor and close friend for the majority of her time in England. This same version of the vows was subsequently published in its entirety in the following books:
- Luis Muñoz, Vida y virtudes de la venerable virgen Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza (Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1632), on ff.48.r-51.v and 95.v-96.r.
- Muñoz's book was the first full-length book on Carvajal's life to be published, and it remained the most important source for information about her life for more than 300 years.
- Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza, Escritos autobiográficos, ed. by Camilo María Abad and Juan Flors (Barcelona: Espirituales Españoles, 1966), pp. 238-45.
- This publication remains the only complete collection of Carvajal’s non-epistolary prose and, along with Abad's other publications on Carvajal, formed an invaluable archive for the exploration of Carvajal's life and works by later scholars.
- Elizabeth Rhodes (ed. and trans.), This Tight Embrace: Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza (1566-1614) (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2000), pp.107-21.
- This book, which was recommended in my original post on this topic, contains a transcription and translation of each vow, prefaced with a useful critical introduction.
A comparison of each of these editions with Carvajal’s own manuscripts confirms that these are, in fact, the final extant versions of each vow.
As I have already mentioned, the aim of this work is to provide a full transcription and translation of every draft of every vow in order to cast a light on the way in which Carvajal carefully crafted her unusual religious way of living during the 1590s. The following post will consist of the transcriptions of the extant drafts of each vow, laying bare the changes between the drafts. In their original manuscript form, those interstitial drafts which have never had a public audience are replete with corrections and marginalia. In my transcriptions, I will preserve these visible corrections to the text, since this better demonstrates just how important it was for Carvajal to word her vows carefully.
For the benefit of those readers who are interested in the topic but unable to read early modern Castilian, in my fourth post on this topic I will follow up my transcriptions of the drafts of the vows with a parallel transcription-translation of the texts. Although it will certainly pose syntactic challenges, I will find a way of incorporating the visual corrections to the text into my translations, since this is central to an understanding of the drafting process.
My fifth post will be my last substantive post on this topic: a textual and contextual, critical analysis of the vows. The sixth and final post will provide a full bibliography of works cited.
