Like many other women writers of early modern Spain, María Vela y Cueto (1561–1617) was a nun who perceived her experiences as directly influenced by God, with whom she communicated on a regular basis, and like those other writers, she was subjected to close surveillance and control by male ecclesiastics who were the immediate recipients and censors of her writing. Her autobiography reveals the trials and triumphs of a woman who at age forty-six took up the pen to refashion herself as a mystic, ascetic, and future saint using models of female sanctity such as Catherine of Siena and, more importantly for her own cultural context, Teresa of Ávila.

In the introduction to María Vela’s writings, Susan Laningham maintains that it is possible to view this nun as a resourceful woman engaged in a struggle to control her own life by manipulating the environment in which she lived. The introduction does an excellent job of delineating the strictures of this environment both within the walls of the Real Monasterio de Santa Ana in Ávila, where María Vela resided for most of her life, and in the larger sociopolitical context of Counter-Reformation Spain. From doctrinal issues such as frequency of Communion to the overall impact of the Council of Trent on the lives of women religious, Laningham enables readers to appreciate the possibilities and pitfalls of the time for women disinclined to submit entirely to the dictates of institutional authority. At the same time as she situates her subject within the tradition of women’s spiritual autobiography, or vidas, Laningham also provides the information necessary to understand María Vela’s individual situation, such as her membership in an elite and illustrious family and convent. Footnotes are abundant and explicate the details of religious routine and politics. In addition, Jane Tar’s “Note on Translation” is a useful commentary on the challenges of creating reader-friendly texts from Vela’s seventeenth-century language and style.

It becomes readily apparent from the beginning of the autobiography that the writer is primarily concerned with her relationships with confessors and the extent to which they restrict or support her peculiar spirituality. Mandated by her last confessor, Miguel González Vaquero, to document her contact with God, she obeys by representing herself as a holy woman whose raptures and visions are signs of divine favor, hence exceptionality. This exceptionality, highly suspect in the eyes of many church officials, becomes the source of her disputes and misunderstandings with a series of priests who are occasionally portrayed as willfully ignoring God’s dictates in order to exercise their own authority. María Vela is not the first to find confessors unacceptable. Saint Teresa, whom she frequently cites, also verbalized her discontent with unsupportive spiritual directors. However, unlike Teresa, the author of this text experiences extreme physical and psychological symptoms (lockjaw, fainting spells, fits of weeping) as a result of the tension between herself and her confessors, and even members of her convent community. The devil is a powerful antagonist in her narrative since she and some of her confessors believe he is the origin of her many trials. In fact, she receives exorcism from more than one confessor, but only González Vaquero, whom she had taken as her confessor in secret, is successful in exorcising her demons.

As indicated in the introduction, María Vela’s Vida is a self-authored hagiography, aimed at securing a place for herself among the saints. Her letters to her brothers Lorenzo and Diego reveal a more candid, familiar tone, as might be expected between members of a family. María’s assessments of confessors and their efforts to curtail her dramatic and unorthodox displays of religious fervor are most often the subjects of these letters and she states her opinions and preferences quite clearly. She clearly values Lorenzo’s opinions highly and ends each letter by asking his advice on a particular issue. There are also translations of two letters from Juan de Alarcón, the influential prior of the Dominican monastery in Ávila, to María and of a letter from her to him. All three letters deal with the prior’s attempt to restrain what he regards as her extreme religiosity.

There are three appendixes: a chronology of María Vela’s life, a list of the many priests who counseled María, and a sonnet by an anonymous nun and admirer of Maria’s. The book in its entirety contributes significantly to our knowledge of the intersection of gender and religion in early modern Spain and should be of great interest to students of spiritual biography, the lives of early modern women, and sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish history.