Abstract
This article examines how Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza's personal choice of religious martyrdom is problematized by her deep political concern. Carvajal, a Spanish aristocrat closely connected to the Society of Jesus, traveled to London shortly after the 1605 Gunpowder Plot in order to seek converts to Catholicism. Her exalted and highly subjective expression of spiritual growth is offset by her enthusiastic, yet earthly, engagement in the imperial dreams of a universal Catholic monarchy. Her letters and autobiography show her engagement in contemporary politics and cast a new light on the tense and always problematic relations between England and Spain. At a time when England was turning its eyes toward Spain both out of anxiety and wonder, as a model to imitate and as an enemy to defeat, Carvajal y Mendoza stands as a fascinating illustration of how the fixed categories of genre and gender imposed by modern criticism on early modern national literatures need to be reassessed as far more permeable and unstable.
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