From Ignatius Loyola to John of the Cross: Spirituality and Literature in Sixteenth-Century Spain

The 16th century saw the rise of movements of religious reform which, in Spain as elsewhere, contributed to make the history of the period such a ferment. In these essays Terence O’Reilly is concerned with the writings produced by these movements, notably Illuminism, the early Jesuits, Erasmianism, and the Carmelite reform, and with the mixture of medieval and new literary conventions that they display. The book first deals with Ignatius Loyola and his Spiritual Exercises, examining its origins in his experience of conversion and the books he read, and locating him not in the period of the militant Counter-Reform, but in an earlier world, linked to the teachings of 16th Spanish Erasmians and illuminists. One study, hitherto unpublished, presents the lost treatise in which the Dominican Melchor Cano argued that Ignatius was an alumbrado. The following sections move to the later the century, considering the connections between spirituality and literature in works such as the ode to Salinas and, above all, in the mystical poetry of John of the Cross and its basis in exegesis and liturgical and devotional texts.