ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the implications of the Audi's gendered language and nuptial imagery for the construction of clerical authority in the early modern church. Although scholars of early modern Catholicism have long acknowledged Juan de Avila's importance as a clerical reformer, far less consideration has been given to his contribution to the mystical literature of Golden Age Spain because of Audi, filia's lack of first person accounts of spiritual ecstasy and the absence of Pseudo-Dionysian apophatic language to describe spiritual ascent. By translating the nuptial spirituality associated with Psalm 44 from the cloister into the emerging world of printed vernacular devotional literature, Avila's Audi was one of the most influential texts of a period in which the piety of devout underwent profound changes. With the Audi, Juan de Avila draws on a tradition extending back to the Patristic age that understands the marriage described in Psalm 44 to be the same as that of the Song of Songs.
