Poetry, Villancicos and Festivals in the Reformed Carmel of the 16th and 17th centuries: the Border between the Lyrical and the Theatrical

Teresa de Jesus was very fond of celebrating liturgical feasts and in-troduced this tradition in the primitive foundations. She herself composed villanci-cos, lyrical poems for various festivities but also for professions and taking of habit. The convents of the recent Reformed Carmel celebrated the different milestones of the liturgical year with music, theater and poetry, especially Christmas, but also the professions of the nuns and other festivals such as Corpus Christi, those of certain saints or invocations of the Virgin Mary, among other. Many Carmelites took up the pen, following in the footsteps of the foundress, and wrote hundreds of texts to brighten up these festivities, most of them unpublished. The task of discovering these texts is an exciting one, and contributes to the recovery of a unique heritage of our Golden Age: the forgotten literature written by women.