The She-Apostle by Glyn Redworth

This is a highly readable biography of Luisa de Carvajal (1566 – 1614), Spanish aristocrat and would-be martyr to the English Catholic cause, set partly in the turbulence and intrigue of Jacobean London.

Sometime Oxford historian Glyn Redworth tells an engrossing, fluent and — to 21st-century readers — disturbing story. With its emphasis on terrorism and counter-terrorism in the name of religion, it has contemporary resonance.

Using Luisa’s domestic invoices, meditations and journals, and 50 poems of spiritual devotion (three of which he appends to the book) Redworth creates a vivid impression of this feisty, pragmatic, well-educated woman.

Her happy, precocious childhood was followed by adolescence in the home of an uncle who subjected her to what seems to have been excessive ritual mortification of the flesh, even by 16th-century standards.

For whatever reason, by 22, the attractive and wealthy Luisa was determined to remain unmarried and to live what society deemed a scandalously conspicuous life of uncloistered poverty. She then racheted up her spiritual disciplines under Jesuit supervision and became fascinated by Elizabeth I's Catholic martyrs.

In 1605, the year of the gunpowder plot, Luisa (dubbed ‘she-apostle’ by English critics) succeeded finally in arriving in London to pursue an underground ministry to Catholics prevented from full observance by James I. For ten years — intending to die a martyr’s death in England — she reported back to Spain, organised the return of corpses of priests slain at Tyburn and was briefly imprisoned. Suffering chronic ill-health, she died in London of natural causes in her 47th year. Though she was eventually beatified, her remains lie in a Madrid convent “barely remembered and still awaiting burial, after 400 years”.

Though this book touches on academic controversy (how far Luisa was self-motivated, and how far she was manipulated by her Jesuit masters) it is a compelling account, as well-suited to the general reader as to the specialist.