This panel explores the enduring spiritual, poetic, and philosophical legacy of Saint Teresa of Ávila across a range of historical periods and literary contexts. Each presentation traces the relational, metaphorical, and affective modes of kinship that link Teresa to later writers through shared metaphors, spiritual concerns, and rhetorical strategies. The session’s transhistorical and transnational scope, spanning the 16^th through the 21^st centuries in Spain, England, and beyond embodies the MLA’s call for expansive, connective sessions that showcase our collective scholarship.

Scholarly interest in the early modern bestseller Teresa has increased since she was declared the first woman Doctor of the Church (1970), intensified around the 4^th Centennial of her death in 1982, and surged again with the 500^th anniversary of her birth, in 2015 and beyond. During this period a new wave of critics, such as Alison Weber, Gillian Ahlgren, Elena Carrera, Lisa Fullam, Raquel Trilla, and Noelia Bueno-Gómez shed light on Teresa’s strategic style and rhetoric of humility and won her new admirers from a wide range of disciplines. By placing Teresa in colloquy with early modern English poetry and modern Spanish fiction and poetry, this session aspires to further extend the temporal, national, and generic boundaries of Teresian influence. The presenters will bring a renewed focus on metaphor as a vehicle of mystical pedagogy, contributing to wider conversations in religious studies, comparative literature, and women’s writing.

Susan E. Matassa (University of Dallas) opens the session with “An ‘Apologie’ for Spanish Intoxication: Spiritual Kinship Between Richard Crashaw and Teresa of Ávila.” This paper examines the seventeenth-century English poet’s apologies to – and for – Teresa by way of Eucharistic and poetic imagery, blood and wine. Matassa argues that Crashaw utilizes Teresa to construct a theology of intoxication for his English audience, and confesses Teresa as catalyst for his own spiritual transformation.

Giada Mirelli (Indiana University) follows with “Divine Kinship: The Legacy of Saint Teresa in the Poetry of Carolina Coronado.” Mirelli analyzes two poems by the nineteenth-century Spanish Romantic poet—A Santa Teresa (1844) and Porque quiero vivir siempre contigo (1848)—that rework Teresa’s pedagogical metaphors. She demonstrates how Coronado uses images such as the battlefield, garden, and bridegroom as learning devices for the path to holiness, suggesting that Teresa’s literary and spiritual language for union with God continue to shape women’s religious expression and spiritual journey in the contemporary era.

Carmen Pereira (Texas Tech University) concludes with “Fuente de agua viva: Metaphor, Truth, Ineffability and the Teresian Legacy in Emilia Pardo Bazán’s Dulce dueño” (1911). Drawing on Nietzsche’s concept of truth as metaphor, Pereira traces how pioneering Spanish first-wave feminist Pardo Bazán invokes Teresa’s metaphor of agua viva—living water—throughout the novel. The narrative’s ambiguity sustains the ineffability of mystical experience while revealing Teresa’s continued relevance in modernist treatments of belief and language.

Each paper will be 15 minutes in length, followed by a 12-minute response from Denise DuPont (Southern Methodist University). As respondent, DuPont will synthesize key ideas and invite presenters and attendees to reflect on how writers across the centuries bond with and borrow from Teresa, composing deep affective, spiritual, and intellectual responses to her life and work. DuPont plans to pick up on an idea from Mirelli’s work: the emphasis in scholarly Teresian work on questions of authorship rather than on the construction of holiness. The respondent hopes participants will explore whether these two foci are at odds or may be seen as complementary, and she will encourage the latter approach, to foster kinship with Teresa. To provide ample time for audience engagement with the panelists and with each other, the final 18 minutes of the session will be reserved for open discussion.

This panel represents a diversity of scholarly voices across career stages and institutions. Susan Matassa and Giada Mirelli are doctoral candidates (Matassa in English, Mirelli in Spanish) at the University of Dallas and Indiana University. Carmen Pereira and Denise DuPont are senior scholars (Professors of Spanish) at Texas Tech University and Southern Methodist University. Embodying the inclusive, comparative spirit that the presidential theme invites, these scholars bring distinct disciplinary and methodological lenses to their engagement with literary and theological questions, and the presentations and response range in focus across early modern English poetry, nineteenth-century Spanish Romantic poetry, early twentieth-century Spanish fiction, and contemporary criticism. In short, this panel on Teresian family resemblances offers a vision of scholarly kinship rooted in metaphor, affective bonds, and the enduring power of mystical literature.