Inter-Subjetive Fear in Teresa de Avila’s Autobiography

Abstract

This article offers an analysis of fear of the devil and fear of hell in sixteenth-century Spain, based on the autobiographical testimony of Teresa of Avila and on influential guides on meditation like those of Ludolph of Saxony, Ignatius of Loyola and Louis of Granada. After reviewing the various existing methodological approaches to the history of the emotions, the article emphasizes the importance of the material, institutional and cultural networks that enable the creation of discourses of emotion which shape and give meaning to the emotional experiences of historical subjects. In proposing that emotions do not lie in the individual, but in social interaction, in people’s relationships with objects, and in their idiosyncratic ways of enacting the textual and visual discourses which surround them, the article examines four ways of reading historical texts and demonstrates how emotions such as the fear of hell or the devil can be understood by those of us who do not have direct experience of them.

Keywords

• historia de las emociones
• intersubjetividad
• siglo xvi
• miedo al infierno
• demonio