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In the Romance world the public figure of our author is often referred to as ‘Santa Teresa’. The broad dissemination of the melodious name is the reason why we decided to use it for the title of the present volume. Yet, the aim of this essay collection is not to reproduce the venerating gesture, but to examine its forms and modes of proceeding. This is why we opted for the subtitle ‘Critical Insights, Filiations, Responses’ – to indicate that we are not blindly, but rather productively engaging with Teresa from a variety of angles that intersect at certain points of her oeuvre and give resonance to each other. The title also underlines our aim to broaden dominant exegetical-theological approaches to understanding this mystic and affirm the plurality of receptions.

According to this choice, the present essays are divided into two first sections regarding Teresa’s writings and their connectivity: ‘On Religion’ and ‘On Aesthetics’.

Teresa of Ávila and Luther – Catholicism versus Protestantism: MARIANO DELGADO’s contribution compares two Friends of God who, despite coming from opposing religious camps and inhabiting different ages, both pursued a transconfessional vision of Christianity and made the inner prayer the focus of their practice. Carefully bringing into conversation female experience-based knowledge and theological scholarship, Delgado portrays Santa Teresa as an influential woman who, although being excluded from studying the Bible, nevertheless decisively influenced the thought of the Mexican mystic Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz through her writing.

Although the Jewish family background of Teresa has long been known, the question of whether she was shaped by the Jewish tradition and faith throughout her life is still debated. By focusing on two of her poems, GEROLD NECKER shows that the Catholic mystic uses metaphors prominent within Jewish literature. But the way Teresa presents these metaphors in a Christian context makes it clear that, instead of proclaiming Jewish contents, Teresa wants to address a Jewish audience in order to show them that Jesus not only suffered for the Christians but also suffered for them.

Not only is Teresa’s orientation in the multi-religious society she lived in an important aspect of her personality, but also her decisions and development within the Catholic faith. MICHAEL PLATTIG O.CARM. shows how the ‘Discernment of Spirits’ (‘Unterscheidung der Geister’) can be identified as an important aspect of Teresa’s religious biography. He describes it as an attitude not given automatically in the life of any Christian, but as an ongoing process of self-examination. Furthermore, Plattig analyzes how Teresa could become a model for the philosopher Edith Stein by proclaiming this attitude.

If we try to understand Teresa as a person together with the fascination she provoked, it is necessary to consider her writings as works of art with a specific aesthetic form and demand. In this spirit, JUAN ANTONIO MARCOS O.C.D. examines the performative quality of Teresa’s writings. He traces the portrait of an author who ultimately wants to affect her readers. She does so, as Marcos shows, by speaking as a teacher and as a woman, by calling God to the witness stand for her own purpose, and by articulating her own difficulties with language. She thereby creates an inventive naturalness that reaches out to readers.

This pragmatic approach is complemented by IRIS ROEBLING-GRAU’s attempt to locate Teresa’s work within the tradition of mirror texts – a concept that, taken from antiquity, explains how and why special texts aim to provoke readers to identify themselves with the contents of the text. Teresa does so when she presents herself as a fragile sinner, always capable of falling, yet persisting as role model for her readers. Thereby, the perfect saint becomes approachable, which might be an important aspect of her reception.

The following two sections, ‘Reception in the 17^th–19^th centuries’ and ‘Reception in the 20^th and 21^st centuries’, deal with different responses to Teresa’s writings during the respective eras.

Looking back, we can say that the reception of Teresa as a figure, as well as the reception of her writings, has been significantly influenced by Bernini’s statue Estasi di Santa Teresa. JOSEPH IMORDE explains how the sculpture can be interpreted as an intersection of the transverberation scene and of the raptures when Teresa had the impression she was being lifted up into the sky. Not only the dart but also the clouds give the saint in the sculpture an enraptured appearance. This representation of heaven was interpreted as sexual pleasure throughout the following centuries. In continuation of this, Imorde presents an ironic reading of the statue by the painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard.

BERNHARD TEUBER portrays the French quietist Madame Guyon (1648–1717) as an enthusiastic and even empathetic reader of Saint Teresa’s writings, as the Carmelite founding mother obviously is an influential role model for her. But in strong contrast to Saint Teresa, Madame Guyon seeks an alternative mode of relating to the self. Her aim is not to take care of herself, but to abandon and eventually lose herself. Abandonment and loss of the self, however, are perceived as spiritually and even sensuously gratifying experiences. Teuber traces this approach not only in Madame Guyon’s prose writings, but also – and more radically – in her less widely read poetry, where she appreciates and even celebrates the pleasures of self-annihilation.

Teresa was also taken into consideration in the nineteenth-century Victorian society, as CAROLE SLADE shows by presenting four female authors that all identified in different ways with the Spanish saint. Harriet Martineau, a journalist and sociologist, was deeply impressed by Teresa’s activity as a foundress. Ann Brownell Jameson, an art historian, stressed Teresa’s personal qualities; George Eliot gave a telling portrait of Teresa in her novel Middlemarch; and Florence Nightingale argued against Teresa in many of her writings, in which she mentioned her as a model with whom she both agreed and disagreed. Thereby, Slade shows how differently Teresa could figure as a reference point, especially for women in a restricted and conservative society.

In the medical discourse of the nineteenth century, Teresa figures among the most prominent hysterics. Especially in Spanish realist and naturalist literature, she is referred to as an almost dangerous influence on her readers. JUTTA WEISER examines La Regenta by Clarín and El cura by López Bago and shows how, by reading Teresa’s The Book of Her Life, the main characters are drawn to questionable forms of piety and even, in the case of El cura, incestuous fantasies and behavior. Clarín remains in the realm of allusion, whereas López Bago uses direct and unvarnished vocabulary mirroring the sometimes dismissive medical discourse.

JENNY HAASE turns to the late works of Anna de Noailles (1876–1933), an enigmatic figure in the literary circles of Paris. Her reflections on love, published as “Poème de l'amour” (1924), give voice to a boundless desire that is both a source of inspiration for her own writing as much as it is a reflection of her endless search for an elusive other. Similar to Teresa’s search for God, Noailles conceives the discourse on love as a self-practice aimed at forming and refining the subject. Alongside establishing this crucial connection with early modern female mysticism, Haase also exposes the radical metaphysical doubt that pervades Noailles’ poetry – a poetry of the twentieth century that is the work of a “mystic without God”.

DENISE DUPONT’s contribution focuses on the Homenaje literario a la gloriosa doctora Santa Teresa de Jesús en el III centenario de su beatificación – a collection of texts from 1914 that has its source in the Spanish tradition of the veneration of saints. She discusses the ways in which the Homenaje essays draw on Teresa as the organizing principle in establishing a different response to the questions raised by modernism. In addition, she highlights the convergence of theological debate with a vision of the Spanish nation in the postcolonial era and shows how Teresa’s humility, charity, faith, and intellect make her an inspiring role model for healing and growth.

MARTIN BAXMEYER’s contribution examines Franco’s aggressive instrumentalization of the myth of Santa Teresa during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and its immediate aftermath by comparing it with another similarly instrumentalized myth: the myth of Our Lady of the Pillar. While Franco’s regime glorified both women as the strong and unapproachable matrons of the Spanish nation, Baxmeyer shows how the anarchist opposition recast them, and Our Lady of the Pillar in particular, as caring mother figures and thus undermined the ‘new’ Francoist myth of Santa Teresa, which misappropriated the early modern feminist as a symbol of its fascist, anti-feminist politics of violence.

In her contribution, MARTINA BENGERT analyzes the fictional north Mexican city of Santa Teresa in 2666 – the magnum opus of Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño (1953–2003) – as a ‘non-place’ whose topography is constituted by the ongoing discovery of dead bodies. She then reads this urban body emerging from the murder of hundreds of female victims as the result of brutal processes of cartographic inscription upon these female bodies. While the pain that St. Teresa experiences upon being impaled by a cherub’s arrow leaves behind the trace of an encounter with God, in Bolaño’s text misogyny and femicide are woven into the very fabric of the city’s name, bringing the impalements suffered by the murdered women into an irresolvable tension with mystical transverberation.

Julia Kristeva’s extensive book Thérèse, mon amour (2005) is one of the most prominent responses to Teresa within current academic discourse. The French literary critic and psychoanalyst reads the saint’s word starting with an analysis of our modern post-secular society. As RACHEAL FEST points out, this reading propagates a new humanism that takes into consideration a modern need to believe beyond the classical framework of Catholic religion. For this new stream, Teresa is Kristeva’s referee, but instead of only annotating Kristeva’s ideas, Fest reads her essay against the grain and discovers problematic anti-Muslim tendencies.

DEVIN ZUBER presents Marina Abramović’s performance The Kitchen – Homage to Saint Therese as a kind of manual for spiritual discipline. He proposes an interpretation of Teresa of Ávila’s writing through the lens of Marina Abramović’s radical performance art. Both stylize their bodies as tools for entering altered states of consciousness, creating experiences within their respective “performances” that blend spiritual ecstasy with searing bodily pain. In doing so, they turn toward the pictorial in order to amplify this “incommensurability” of their bodies-as-signifiers, creating an excess that points beyond the body as a vector for spiritual illumination.

Taking Teresa’s accounts of her mystical experiences as their point of departure, ELISABETH PETROW and TORSTEN PASSIE examine the genesis of Teresa’s ecstasies and transverberations from a medical point of view, arguing that her experiences must be seen in connection with the long-term effects of a meningitis infection caused by neurobrucellosis. In light of the many other severe illnesses Teresa faced over the course of her lifetime, Petrow and Passie refrain from pathologizing her accounts. Instead, they highlight Teresa’s remarkable resilience and, linked to it, underscore the opportunity to achieve wholeness through illness.

The last essay in Spanish by the Argentine-French author and journalist ALICIA DUJOVNE ORTIZ can be considered a personal response to the mystic: “Letras del cielo”, finally, is a literary essay in which Dujovne Ortiz reflects on her 2012 novel Un corazón tan recio and creates a fictional context in which she encounters Teresa. This encounter culminates in an identification with Teresa as a strong woman: as a feminist, as a businesswoman, as a traveler, as a woman who speaks about her experiences, and who is (also) rooted in Jewish culture.

Yet, as always, there still remain questions. Devin Zuber, one of the authors of our essay collection, has addressed four such questions to the artist Marina Abramović. We are grateful to present this conversation in lieu of a closing remark at the end of the volume.

Through these multiple perspectives we aim to present different answers to the question as to why and how Teresa, “la más universal de nuestras escritoras”1, could be connected to so many different contexts.

In contrast to Cinco Siglos de Teresa, the rich volume of contributions published in 2016, the present collection does not investigate the contemporary Spanish contexts in which Teresa is read, nor does it limit itself to tracing Teresa’s influence on the Carmelites, or on theology or philology at large. Instead, its aim is to foster genuinely interdisciplinary scholarship that encourages encounters between psychology, cultural studies, art history, art, and religious studies. Our main impetus is to exploit the tensions created by contrasting standpoints: Gerold Necker, for instance, believes the spiritual influence of Judaism represents only a minor influence in Teresa’s work, whereas Alicia Dujovne Ortiz suggests that it plays a major role. Michael Plattig O.Carm. explores how Edith Stein’s interest in Teresa’s works sparked her inner resistance, while Martin Baxmeyer traces how Teresa was instrumentalized by Franco’s fascist regime. It is precisely the friction caused by these and other contrasting approaches to Teresa’s life and works that promises to give way to productive readings to a saint and mystic who carried within herself multiple dualities – dualities that she was able to accommodate as she progressed through life.