front cover of Spiritual Writings of Sister Margaret of the Mother of God (1635-1643)
Spiritual Writings of Sister Margaret of the Mother of God (1635-1643)
Margaret Van Noort
Iter Press, 2015

In 1635, as directed by her confessor so that he might understand “the state of her soul,” Margaret Van Noort, a lay sister of the royal convent of Discalced Carmelite nuns in Brussels, composed her spiritual autobiography. This text was followed by two diaries in 1636 and 1637 recording the workings of her inner life and relation to God, and reflecting the cosmopolitan Catholic tradition of her homeland. Now gathered in this volume, these works illustrate Margaret’s development from a troubled young lay sister into a woman of spiritual experience and authority.

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front cover of Letters and Poems to and from Her Mentor and Other Members of Her Circle
Letters and Poems to and from Her Mentor and Other Members of Her Circle
Anna Maria van Schurman
Iter Press, 2021
Anna Maria van Schurman was widely regarded as the most erudite woman in seventeenth-century Europe. As “the Star of Utrecht,” she was active in a network of learning that included the most renowned scholars of her time. Known for her extensive learning and her defense of the education of women, she was the first woman to sit in on lectures at a university in the Netherlands and to advocate that women be admitted into universities. She was proficient in fourteen languages, including Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Aramaic, Persian, Samaritan, and Ethiopian, as well as several vernacular European languages.

This volume presents in translation a remarkable collection of her letters and poems—many of which were previously unpublished—that span almost four decades of her life, from 1631 to 1669.
 
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front cover of Autobiography and Letters of a Spanish Nun
Autobiography and Letters of a Spanish Nun
María Vela Y Cueto
Iter Press, 2016

When María Vela y Cueto (1561–1617) declared that God had personally ordered her to take only the Eucharist as food and to restore primitive dress and public penance in her aristocratic convent, the entire religious community, according to her confessor, “rose up in wrath.” Yet, when Vela died, her peers joined with the populace to declare her a saint. In her autobiography and personal letters, Vela speaks candidly of the obstacles, perils, and rewards of re-negotiating piety in a convent where devotion to God was no longer expressed through rigorous asceticism. Vela’s experience, told in her own words, reveals her shrewd understanding of the persuasive power of a woman’s body.

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