ABSTRACT
In 1611 Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza wrote this letter from London to the English Jesuit Joseph Creswell, then in Valladolid:
If your honour can send me one of the books I asked for, I beg you to do so. I strongly wish to have Cayrasco’s Lives of the Saints in verse, all twelve months of them, and of those here that understand the language some like them very much indeed. What you have been so kind as to send me so far, sir, I have received, but I have not been able to look at them. The friends will look at them but they say when things like this are in Spanish, it is silly and pointless to write them in any language other than English, or at least Latin. If it is written for them, they say, what use is it in Spanish?
I am sending over England’s Book of Religion, where you will see the most monstrous lies that you have heard in your life, sir. A Protestant gentleman sent me his so that I could see his splendid religion, and I have folded over each page where there are lies and contradictions, of which there are many, so you can see them.
[I] was showing a Protestant the horrendous blasphemies that Calvin writes in his book Institutions on this very point… . He replied that it weighs on his soul that such a great man had said such things, but he could also guarantee that were Calvin alive today he would change his mind about these statements, and this from an elderly man and a graduate, who fancies himself as learned.
[W]e have Mother Teresa’s book about her life, in English, and very well translated.
[T]his relic is flesh from the breast of holy Father Roberts, which, seeing that it had gone bad, I removed. Please give a little of it to Señor Ceráin from me, sir.
(Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza to Joseph Creswell, S.J., London, September 3, 1611) 1