ABSTRACT

This chapter examines some of the most popular devotional texts which circulated in sixteenth-century Spain, placing the emphasis on the experiential form of reading they promoted. It focuses on how sixteenth-century Spanish reading subjects were encouraged to transform themselves through internalizing the ideas and methods of learning drawn from devotional books. The chapter shows how readers like Teresa were encouraged to involve themselves as knowing subjects in their experiential knowledge of God, rather than simply to consider Christian truths as something external to them. It explores Ricoeur's idea of mutual interpretation of reader and text at the basis of 'moral exegesis', understood as a process in which 'the meaning of Christ and the meaning of existence mutually decipher each other'.