The She-Apostle: The Extraordinary Life and Death of Luisa de Carvajal

by Glyn Redworth

Here is the full-length biography of Luisa de Carvajal (1568-1614), possibly the first female missionary of modern times. Born into a great Spanish family, Luisa suffered an abusive childhood, dreamt of martyrdom for the Catholic Church and smuggled herself into England in the year of the
Gunpowder Plot. The book explores her courageous intrigues on behalf of the Catholic cause in Protestant England, from distributing banned books to preserving and distributing the bodily remains of executed priests. She risked imprisonment and execution for these activities, a fate she miraculously
managed to avoid in spite of being arrested on a number of occasions. This vividly written biography, the first to give equal treatment to her double life in Spain and England, is based on Luisa's own autobiographical writings, her sparkling collection of poems and letters, and the detailed
reminiscences by dozens of people who worked with her. The book contains Luisa's biting--and often humorous--descriptions of the cost of living in Shakespeare's London, the poor quality of food in the capital, as well as the weekend rowdiness of the English.

Genres: Nonfiction

304 pages, Hardcover

First published September 25, 2008

Reviews

[Leanda Lisle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Today, at the Tyburn convent near Marble Arch, nuns pray over the remains of Catholic priests executed during the Reformation period. Catholics regard them as holy relics and the priests as martyrs, butchered by a persecuting Protestant state. This biography tells the story of a woman who helped gather such relics, smuggling the corpses of those who died for their faith in Jacobean England.

Luisa de Carvajal, was a Spanish aristocrat who came to England as a Catholic missionary in 1605, the year of the Gunpowder Plot. Catholic priests could be executed just for being in England and Luisa hoped that she too would be martyred. It was not her fate, however, to die on ‘Tyburn tree’, the scaffold that once stood at what is now Marble Arch. Instead her role was to retrieve the body parts of priests that had been hung, drawn and quartered there, to have them brought to her house to be prepared for dispersal as relics.

A strange, but powerful character emerges from Luisa’s letters and Glyn Redworth’s research: one that has dark undercurrents. Raised at a time when Spain was in the vanguard of female education, and highly intelligent, Luisa was introduced in childhood to brutal beatings: first at the hands of a beloved nurse, then an equally loved uncle gave her a whip for ‘penitential exercises’ administered to her by a female servant. What Luisa endured was regarded with dismay even in sixteenth century Spain, and it forged someone with a disturbing willingness to embrace suffering. But Luisa was never reduced to subservience.

In common with English women such as the martyr Margaret Clitherow and Mary Ward, who founded a proselytizing order of nuns derided by the Pope as ‘galloping girls’, Luisa followed her own path, in opposition to an absolutist Protestant state and against the current of the Counter Reformation, whose leaders would have preferred to see her in a convent.

Jacobean England is very immediate in Luisa’s letters, with her complaints about noisy neighbours and poor food, as well as in the descriptions of the Protestant government’s priest hunters. Such men brought to an end to Luisa’s body collecting in 1613, when 50 armed men broke down her doors in Spitalfields. Her health was already poor and she died soon afterwards. Luisa’s last words were to thank God for an extraordinary life. It is recaptured here for the first time. Original and unsettling, it is a grim but fascinating story.



An edited version of this review appeared in History Today in 2008

[Victoria · Rating 4 out of 5]

Firstly I would like to thank Leanda De Lisle for posting this intriguing book as a recommendation. I really enjoyed reading it.

I have to say I knew absolutey nothing about Luisa as a subject and I only have a very limited knowledge of the era in which her story takes place. I have previously read up a little bit about the Gunpowder Plot so my knowledge of the period is limited to the cirucmstamnces surrounding the plot.

To start with I did find the book a bit hard going - this is not due to the writing style ( which is accessible throughout) but I think due to the fact that I knew nothing about the subject. In many respects that made me want to continue reading but at the saem time made me feel a bit like a newcomer!

Luisa was certainly a very interesting and strong minded woman. She knew how she wanted to live her life and lived it! However, at times I almost found myself shouting inside at her for being so stubborn or single minded! Whilst , I can understand her wanting to take relics of those she considered marytrs I have to say I found it a bit odd that one would actively wish to have decaying body parts in one's house! But I had to laugh at the fact that the Duke of Lerma was somewhat put out when he didn't recieve a relic/body part in the post!

Overall, a well written, accessible study of a woman who I now have at least a reasonable knowledge about. An interesting insight into her life and times and well worth the read.

[Philip · Rating 3 out of 5]

I usually don’t start book reviews with a warning, but this time I have to break the habit of a lifetime and issue one. If you are a Christian, you might find what follows offensive.

The She-Apostle by Glyn Redworth is a tale of self-harm, ideological control, and international terrorism. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, when the book is set, the social medium within which the self-harm of especially young women was perpetrated was the Church. The ideological control in question was also perpetrated by the Church, a control so absolute, misguided and complete that individuals often suffered hallucination as a result of the guilt that was heaped upon them by what they were taught. International terrorism, in the case of The She-Apostle, is manifest in the Gunpowder Plot, when a group of ideologically driven fanatics tried to blow up the entire political leadership of a sovereign state, being England under James the First. If this were a review of a contemporary novel, the fact that it featured self-harm promoted by social media, hallucinations and violence, and international terrorism might be merely par for the course. When, as is the case of Glyn Redworth’s book, it is associated with the life of a seventeenth century saint, it may seem strange. It might just be that little has changed in human society in the intervening four hundred years, except, of course, our appreciation of just how brutal life was at that time.

Doña Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza was born in Extremadura into a Spanish nobility that was enjoying the country’s Golden Age. Colonies overseas were disgorging their riches towards the seat of imperial power, the nobility were gobbling up the proceeds and Spanish priests were at work, saving the souls of a whole continent by converting them to Christianity, whilst at the same time sending them to heaven at the double by infecting them with smallpox, influenza, and typhoid. Europe was riven by ideological differences between Catholics and Protestants that to an outsider seem about as consequential as disagreeing about how many angels would fit on a pinhead. If you are a Christian, I accept, angels matter. If you are not, they don’t exist. The evidence, surely, lies on that side, but whenever did the ideologically committed ever trouble themselves with evidence? Unless, of course, it could be twisted into a case against someone who thought differently from oneself…

Born with several silver spoons already in her mouth, Luisa sought solace in faith. She was regularly abused by her guardian, in the name of God, of course, and regularly harmed herself with instruments of torture. Eventually, she adopted a life of frugality, continued to self-harm, and to pioneer a life of religious devotion that was personal rather than institutionalized. She never became a nun. She also decided to free the English from the manacles of Protestantism and, soon after the armada had failed to do the same by force, moved to England to follow her mission.
Glyn Redworth’s The She-Apostle is more than a biography of Luisa. It perhaps stops short of being a conventional hagiography. The author does describe the personal and societal consequences of Luisa’s campaign to promote Roman Catholicism in Protestant England, but quite often a reader might feel that the author stopped short of delivering the criticisms of her actions that he himself felt. Luisa may indeed have sought martyrdom, but her crime in the end was to steal the remains of already butchered Roman Catholics, put to death by a state that arrogated absolute power because of the terrorism they threatened.

As a reminder, it must be pointed out that the method of choice by which the just imposed their will on dissenters was as follows. “Hung, drawn and quartered” might sound like it might apply to a Spanish ham. But in that age, it meant being hung by the neck until you are almost dead. Then you were cut down and disembowelled, your intestines being trailed onto a fire as you watched. Then your arms, legs and head were cut off and then the final ignominy was that your torso was cut into quarters, each part of you destined for a different resting place. The idea, of course, was ideologically driven in that admission to heaven needed intact remains, so once quartered, a person was to be damned forever.

Louisa, herself, was indeed arrested for stealing the remains of executed Catholics, although she herself died eventually in bed. She wanted to pass on the dried-out flesh and bones of the martyred as relics to consecrate holy places. But she was spared the ignominy of the gallows and axe so there was no obvious martyrdom for her. Glyn Redworth’s book, though superficially adulatory, does give a vivid portrayal of the political and social life of the time, and as such it is worth reading. For a believer, I suppose it provides joyous example of a pious life. For a nonbeliever, like me, it portrays the shockingly violent absurdity of the irrational.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Luisa de Carvajal was a singular woman with a modest role in history. I loved this book. I respect Luisa de Carvajal. She was ardently, burningly, self-flagellatingly Catholic back when that was a fringe activity but less worrisome, although her aunt found it worrying.

Luisa lived a charming, monastically-influenced but upper crust childhood, first as an indulged daughter, and after her parents died, as a beloved companion to Spanish Infantas. After another death in her family, the already self-abegnating Luisa was sent to her uncle, who was into the mortification of the flesh, including her flesh (but not his daughters' flesh, because his wife wouldn't allow it). Oh boy. Luisa, incredibly, emerged from this crucible of what may or may not have been sexual abuse strong and willful and determined never to marry and never to enter a convent, because it would cramp her style. This threw a wrench into her father's stipulations for her inheritance because her father specified a certain amount if she was married and a smaller amount if she entered a convent, but he never anticipated that she would adopt a life of independent, monastic poverty outside of a religious house while insisting that she should receive the larger amount of inheritance so that she could give it all away to the Jesuits.

Luisa was a contemporary of Teresa of Avila and was definitely influenced by other female religious writers, but Redworth traces her primary influence as St. Ignatius Loyola, whose writings she modeled her household on. Gradually, while living next door to a college educating English Catholics because Catholic education (and Catholicism) were banned in Elizabethan England, Luisa developed a plan: She would go to England and be martyred. Working through this plan took years. Luisa was in poor enough health that surviving travel seemed unlikely. She was an unattached woman. She was a loose cannon and a liability. She might cause an international incident. But she had also given enough money to the Jesuits that there was an obligation to support her in whatever she wanted.

When she was nearly forty, Luisa was allowed into England. Redworth argues that she might be the first female missionary, or at least the first modern female Christian missionary, or the first unattached female Christian missionary. She was also deeply conservative and reviled James I's "don't ask, don't tell" policy on Catholicism. She set up a house near the Spanish embassy and relied on the protection of the Spanish ambassador while also not doing everything as he would have preferred it. Her letter writing to relatives and other people with massive influence at the Spanish court kept the Catholic martyrs of the English Protestants at the front of everyone's minds. She also tried her hand at converting English people, or renewing the faith of those who were waffling on their Catholicism because they needed to survive in England. She visited arrested priests in prison. And she meddled in Anglo-Spanish relations to the best of her ability, from a deeply held belief that she was defending the faith and staying out of politics. She also dabbled in the creation of relics from the bodies of martyred priests.

Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza was a fierce woman. She lived as she believed best, and she may have done good for the British Catholic community. Her canonization has yet to happen. As a Spaniard in Britain whose earthly remains were transported back to Spain, her followers were dispersed and unable to pull their evidence together. The pope had also just changed the canonization rules. Michael Walpole wrote a short account of her life immediately after her death, and her letters survive. One of the most incredible things about Luisa, besides her life and tenacity, is the amount of information about her that we still have. Glyn Redworth has put together a fascinating biography of a woman who is well worth reading about. I loved this one.

Thanks to G. David Booksellers for having a fronted stack of remainders on their religion shelf in their scary basement. I would not have found this one without your fine merchandising.

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A disturbing biography of Luisa de Carvajal, an aristocratic Spanish women, who travelled to England as a missionary in the early 17th century, embracing a life of poverty and a zeal for martrydom. I found it distinctly odd and very much 'of its time'.

[Monica]

from kelly