The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus is the spiritual autobiography of the Spanish Carmelite reformer and Doctor of the Church (1515–1582). Written at the order of her confessors, who wanted her account of the unusual mystical phenomena she was experiencing so they could test their orthodoxy, it is at once a personal memoir, a defence under suspicion of the Spanish Inquisition, and the most detailed manual of contemplative prayer the sixteenth century produced. The famous later chapters on the four "waters" of prayer became, with her Interior Castle and Way of Perfection, the foundation of all subsequent Carmelite teaching on contemplation. Teresa's prose is at once startlingly direct, dryly funny, and (when describing what she has seen) of unsurpassed precision in mystical literature. This edition reproduces David Lewis's nineteenth-century classic English translation.
