This translation of the autobiography and selected works by the Spanish nun Ana de San Bartolomé (1549–1626) forms part of the University of Chicago Press series The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. The book includes a series editors’ introduction, written by Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil, Jr. (ix–xxviii); a volume editor's introduction and bibliography by Darcy Donahue (1–31); a translation of Ana de San Bartolomé's selected works (37–139); a series editors’ bibliography (143–63); and an index. The translated works consist of the autobiography of Ana de San Bartolomé and three short appendices: “An Account of the Foundation at Burgos”; “Prayer in Abandonment, 1607”; and “Spiritual Lectures, Pontoise, July 1605.” The translator also includes a “Chronology of the Life of Ana de San Bartolomé” (141–42).

Darcy Donahue's English version of San Bartolomé's works fulfills the objective of the Other Voice series of recovering and translating a variety of little-known European discourses from 1300–1700 that often belong to the female tradition of protest and resistance to the establishment. This series endeavors to accomplish a call for justice and recognition of the other voice “as the source and origin of the mature feminist tradition and of the realignment of social institutions accomplished in the modern age” (xxvii). In the field of early modern Spanish literature, the translation also responds to the growing interest since the late 1980s in recuperating the written works of religious women, which was spurred by the pioneering studies of Electa Arenal, Stacey Schlau, and others feminist critics, including Donahue.

Ana de San Bartolomé was a nurse and companion of Teresa de Avila from 1577 to Teresa's death in 1582 and later became a fervent supporter of the Carmelite reform. She was influential in the establishment of the reform in France and the Low Countries and became an adviser of important figures, such as Cardinal Bérulle and Princess Isabel Clara Eugenia, daughter of Philip II of Spain and regent of the Low Countries (2). Semiliterate when she entered the convent in 1570, San Bartolomé became a prolific writer of letters, accounts of the Teresian reform, advices to younger nuns, devotional texts, and autobiographical narratives. Julián Urkiza published her complete works, Obras completas (Rome [1982–85]), and Fortunato Antolín edited her autobiography (Madrid [1969]), of which an English translation from the French exists (Autobiography of the Blessed Mother Anne of Saint Bartholomew, by an unknown Religious of the Carmel of St. Louis [1916]). Of the two extant self-accounts by San Bartolomé, Donahue has chosen to translate the first and longest, composed between 1607 and 1625, because this “version is of much greater interest with regard to her interactions with prelates and her visionary experience” (16). The base text for her translation is the modernized version by Antolín. She completes the elisions and differences of Antolin's edition with the Urkiza text, which is a transcription of the original form. In addition to these two sources, Donahue has consulted the anonymous English translation of the Autobiografía. She uses Urkiza's text for her translation of the excerpts added in the appendices.

The autobiography of Ana de San Bartolomé is typical of many personal accounts written by religious women of the period. In her work, Ana traces her spiritual development and includes testimonies of daily life in the convent, relationships, and events connected with the expansion of the Carmelite reform in Europe. Her narration, heavily shaped by supernatural visions, is fragmented and written in colloquial language. Her syntax, vocabulary, and spelling, as well as the absence of literary sources, reveal the author's lack of formal education and her rural origin. In view of the difficulties that this text presents, it is commendable that Donahue's translation has successfully achieved her stated objective of producing an English version both “readable and comprehensible” (34).