ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to examine the cultural interaction and conflict that took place between the forms of female mysticism and the institutional discourse of the Spanish Catholic Church in the wake of the Council of Trent. This conflict, as the author hope to prove, was motivated by the institutional need to repress and control the individual interpretation of some tendencies and forms of worship that Catholicism itself had put into circulation. The particular political conditioning of the Council of Trent had set the stage in Spain for a renewed insistence on all those aspects of Catholic sacramental practice that differed from the Protestant concentration on interiority and austerity. The worship of saints and of the Virgin, the intense use of iconography in devotional practice, the authority of the clergy over the lay population in religious matters, were significantly intensified throughout the reign of Philip II, and the role of the Inquisition in this process was essential.
