Alternative Visions of the Teresian Heritage
The chapter shows how, within a year after the Discalced Carmelites of Teresa of Avila’s reform were founded in France, opinions diverged on just what constituted an authentic Teresian reform. Spanish nuns brought to guarantee the new order’s authenticity found Paris’s convent of the Incarnation too big, too grand, and too ambitious to lead the order’s expansion. They worked to ensure that the second convent, founded outside Paris at Pontoise, conformed more closely to Teresa’s desire to keep the houses small and poor. The chapter uses written records and art to show how nuns at Pontoise created their own vision of an authentic Teresian convent but in doing so provoked a rivalry that threatened at times to divide the rapidly growing French order. The case illustrates well the challenges not just of defining and enacting religious reform but also of adapting reform to local circumstances and values.