“Since Then, the Desire Has Lived in Me to Own Her Holy Life, and to Have it Written”: Textual Overlaps in the Biography of the Discalced Carmelite Juana de la Santísima Trinidad (1575-1653)

Abstract

A miscellaneous manuscript in the National Library of Spain (Ms. 8693) preserves, among its more than five hundred folios, the letter that Sor Isabel de la Trinidad, a Poor Clare residing in Lerma, addressed to the Discalced Carmelites of Écija. In her correspondence, she expresses gratitude for an extraordinary gift: a copy of the biography of her grandmother, Sor Juana de la Santísima Trinidad. Juana Hurtado de Mendoza y Enríquez, Duchess of Béjar (1575-1653) professed in the Carmelite convent of Seville after becoming widowed in 1619. A few years later she would found the convent of San José in Écija. Following her death, her Carmelite
sisters undertook the task of documenting her life—this anonymous biography remains the sole surviving account of Juana’s cloistered life. The case of Juana de la
Santísima Trinidad illuminates the networks of exchange, that nuns cultivated during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Although adhering to the hagiographic conventions of her time, Juana de la Santísima Trinidad’s biography shows how the Carmelites of Écija learnt to transform an exercise of polyphonic writing into a legitimizing tool to place their peripheric Andalusian convent in the mythical history of the order.