ABSTRACT
By any standard, Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza lived an extraordinary life, especially for a seventeenth-century woman. A Spanish Catholic lay woman, she was able to convince the elites in the Catholic Church and at the Spanish court to allow her to serve as a missionary in England from 1605 until her death in 1614. There, she was able to break free of the restrictions increasingly placed on women in Counter Reformation Spain; thus, her life seemed closer to that of the Jesuit ‘soldier’ than to the cloistered nun. In England, she worked to convert the local population, to minister to Catholics in prison, and to evade guards in order to collect the remains of those whom she considered martyred saints. Throughout all this, she seems to have been seeking martyrdom; certainly, she did everything she could to offend the Protestant establishment. Why did the powers-that-be in Spain agree to allow her to cultivate such pursuits even when her actions caused Spain significant diplomatic difficulties? How did she frame her letters so that she could ensure support for her unconventional activities in England and at the same time urge Philip III to resist compromise and to turn the full power of Spain against the ‘infidel’?
