2014/01/13 by G. F. Allen · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · #Early Modern Women Writers #Latin American history and culture #Spanish Literature and Culture Studies #Humanities #History #Art #Art history
paper · doi:10.1093/ehr/cet339
openalex publication_date 2014/01/13 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
‘I was certainly not brought to England by the quest for glory, or by thinking any great thing of myself, or by wanting anyone in this world to remember me at all’, wrote Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza in 1606, ‘I desire only the perfect fulfilment of His will, even if that means I would be dying every moment, and I can say that I do die every time that I realise I am on this island’ (Letter 60). As a thirty-nine-year-old Spanish noblewoman, Luisa had arrived in England a year earlier for a self-imposed exile. While she sought to contribute to the Catholic community in Jacobean London, her ultimate aim was martyrdom. ‘I think these heretics will have to make a martyr of me one day’, she recorded in another letter, ‘though I do not know when or how’. Despite two arrests in London, Luisa was deprived of her martyr’s end, dying in her own bed on her forty-eighth birthday. She left behind a voluminous surviving correspondence, and this important edition by Glyn Redworth and Christopher Henstock provides translations into English of all of Luisa’s extant letters, making this rich correspondence accessible to new scholarly audiences.