Teresa of Avila

The Progress of a Soul

by Cathleen Medwick

Knopf, 304 pp., $26

Anyone who thinks a worldly New York editor is suspicious in the role of a medieval saint’s biographer doesn’t know Saint Teresa. With a gift for administration and an ecstatic devotion to Christ, Teresa of Avila, also known as Teresa of Jesus (and occasionally the “patron saint of hysteria”), has always cut an eerily modern figure, and rarely more so than as she appears in the pages of Cathleen Medwick’s The Progress of a Soul. By any standards, Teresa’s life was rocky. Plagued with illness, Teresa’s body and mind were also racked with mystical experiences so dramatic they made her a controversial figure in her own time as well as in ours, attracting the suspicious eye of the Inquisition to her convent. But if the ecstasies put her in danger’s path, they also set her down (on God’s authority) into the middle of many a political fray. Medwick writes with tenderness for her eccentric, charismatic subject and with a distinctly contemporary voice, tracing Teresa’s quest for (what may seem anomalous to present-day sensibilities) freedom within the convent.

This article appears in August 4 • 2000.

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