Spain’s Sociocultural Cross Section Seen Through Santa Teresa de Jesus’ Inquisitorial Process

Santa Teresa, known today as the Saint of Avila, was active throughout Spain in the mid-16th century when the banner of the reactionary Reformation was in full swing. She pioneered a reform monastic order called the Order of the Barefoot Carmen and founded 17 monasteries throughout Castile and Andalusia. It showed the history of its establishment. However, one of the major events that brought her to the public eye was her involvement in the Inquisition case, which was constantly brought up because of her similarity to the Alumbrados who had taken the Castile region by storm. Meanwhile, the lawsuit surrounding her, unlike the typical frame of the Inquisition’s persecution of conversos, was the aftermath of intensifying doctrinal debates and social tensions in Europe before and after Luther’s Reformation, which aggravated rigidity among Spanish intellectuals and led to a movement similar to Protestantism. It would be more appropriate to see that the form of faith was first treated and condemned with suspicion, surveillance, and exclusion. In other words, rather than developing in a manner in which they were unilaterally persecuted by a large power institution called the Inquisition, it developed in a way in which workers in specific occupations reported and conversely put pressure on the central Inquisition. This can be seen as a reflection of the practice of collective faith that was solidified after the Council of Trent and the rejection of forms of faith that are different.