ABSTRACT
This chapter looks more closely at how Teresa came to use writing as a means of communication with confessors, by examining her attempts to seek authoritative advice outside her circle of spiritual directors, and by analysing her earliest extant piece of writing as one of the strategies she adopted to prove the truthfulness of her spiritual experiences. It pursues a connection which has not been made before, between the practice of confession as an instrument for encouraging the unlettered to communicate their ideas m private and Teresa's courageous act of writing about prayer as an extension of that private framework. Teresa found a further opportunity to obtain approval for her mystical prayer when, on 17–25 August 1560, the notable Franciscan Pedro de Alcantara came to found a reformed monastery in the mayorazgo which her friend Dona Guiomar de Ulloa had inherited in Aldea del Palo.
