ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the context in which Teresa of Avila and other religious women inspired the women to strive. It discusses the close reading of the sources, showing how these Portuguese religious women rendered a notion of will based on an interior visionary knowledge that enabled them into public action and examines its impact on their emerging, self-perceived political identity. Searching for God can been considered an inner process that requires self-knowledge and a will to act when choosing the best ways to reach the ultimate goal. When considering the Portuguese seventeenth century, where many religious women become subjects and characters in an unrestricted search for God and their humanity, the notion of willfullness becomes crucial. The first scholars to work on Portuguese convent literature focused on hagiographical sources and autobiographies and framed them in the context of ecstatic devotional practice, a phenomenon widespread within Tridentine piety; and on the quietism of Miguel Molinos.
