“spiritual marriage” she describes in the seventh mansion. She was fifty-seven years old. In 1582, at the age of sixty-seven, she died, worn out from her labors. Along with John of the Cross, she had carried out a very difficult reform of the Carmelite order, and by the time of her death there were seventeen reformed monasteries with over two hundred nuns and ten monasteries containing approximately three hundred friars. Teresa, at the request of her spiritual director,
Page 20