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This article argues that the proliferation of metaphor in Teresa of Ávila's Las moradas del castillo interior (1577) obfuscates her reap-propriation of allegorical imagery from two devotional texts banned by the Valdés Index of 1559: Francisco de Osuna's Tercer abecedario espiritual (1527) and Bernardino de Laredo's Subida al monte Sión (1535). Teresa needed these texts to enact her reform of the Carmelite Order, as primers to instruct her nuns in a controversial contemplative practice called mental prayer. To restore her sisters' access to the banned content, she wrote a mental-prayer manual, the Moradas, that slips some of Osuna's and Laredo's images and ideas in among her own. Teresa's introduction of several competing allegories for the soul is both a performance of feminine incompetence that intentionally impedes readers' comprehension of her doctrine of mental prayer and a means of smuggling concepts crucial to her reform project back into circulation.
