Teresa of Avila is arguably the most beloved, even the most important, early modern saint, a paradigm of baroque art and devotion. She is the subject of vast amounts of scholarship. I have lectured and taught on Teresa so often that her prominence can feel like a given. But Pamela Jones’s book on Teresian festivities has reframed how I understand her cult and her role in early modern Catholicism. The book establishes how Teresa’s towering status was rooted in meticulously designed campaigns of celebration, exported to, and customised for, an expanding, unpredictable Catholic world. An early modern devotee’s love and reverence towards a saint was channelled, amplified and shaped through these ceremonies.

Celebrating Teresa of Avila offers detailed reconstructions of eight festivals in Genoa, Rome, Naples, Hormuz and Goa, each celebrating Teresa at key points in her journey to sainthood, organised by the male, Italian branch of the order she founded: the Discalced Carmelites. This branch differed from all other branches of the order (Spanish male; Spanish female; Italian female) after Clement viii repurposed it as a missionary order that would be loyal to him, not Spain. An outlier among other missionary groups and other, cloistered, Discalced Carmelites, the group has received little scholarly attention. With this work, Jones seeks to redress that imbalance and others, using previously unknown manuscripts and printed texts.

The Italian Discalced Carmelites mounted lavish ceremonies for Teresa’s beatification and canonisation, and for other milestones, in each of their various mission locations. As Jones shows, each of these festivities was carefully tailored to address the local political and religious needs. In papal Rome, beatification and canonisation ceremonies emphasised Teresa’s role as head of a global missionary order. Neapolitan festivities focused on the city’s viceregal links with the Spanish crown – for example, by adapting the Spanish Union’s coat of arms into Teresa’s official standard as a new Blessed. In the book’s only case study of cloistered nuns, a virtual procession inside the convent placed Teresa within a genealogy of holy women, each individualised with attributes linked to hers. Hormuz, in contrast, was home to many religious communities, and to a Catholic congregation of many ethnic backgrounds. The Discalced Carmelite missionaries in Hormuz calibrated its festivities to address specific, contradictory goals: preserving European authority; avoiding tension with local Augustinians; appealing to a markedly diverse Catholic congregation; and intriguing a broader population of many faiths. The Goa mission, which was more stable and better established used its festivities to solicit donations to the mission cause from wealthy local European patrons.

In every case, the symbolism of each song, image, decorative banner, temporary arch and processional route was painstakingly designed, and reflected the enormous erudition and commitment of the scholarly priests who planned it. Teresa’s official persona and saintly attributes were formally codified at her canonisation, determining how she should be represented in art. Images of Teresa showed her enraptured while reading, combining her status as a mystic and a learned teacher. Jones analyses how other individual aspects of each festive visual depiction – which might look generic to the untrained eye – were also fine-tuned to convey specific points of doctrine and devotion. Jones is attentive to these minute or coded shifts of emphasis and skilfully links them to local concerns. In addition, each celebration added its own emphases, such as a premature halo, the strategic use of the Portuguese vernacular, or a large-scale poetry competition. By comparing parallel, superficially similar rituals in vastly different contexts, Jones is able to draw out the unique politics, circumstances and relationships of each setting.

Festival studies is a well-established interdisciplinary subfield. Jones demonstrates its centrality to early modern Catholicism and its value for understanding Catholicism’s global spread. Festivals such as those for Teresa served multiple functions at once. They celebrated and strengthened individual faith and devotion, encouraged conversion and helped to establish and maintain community identity. Unlike a sermon or a mass, festivals offered a multimedia spectacle, combining art, music and literature, engaging all bodily senses and transforming local streets into sacred Catholic spaces. In this way, they could appeal to a multilevel audience of spectators from all backgrounds. They also provided peerless opportunities for patronage and fundraising, especially in unstable mission contexts. But where most research on these ceremonies draws on commemorative printed festival books, Jones has identified a series of manuscripts in Roman archives (and a long printed source) that were previously unknown to scholars. Her analytical reconstructions of festivities from these documents gives us a far fuller picture of Teresa’s prominent role in in global Catholic missions. Happily, she has also been able to include nearly sixty images and graphics, many in colour.

Celebrating Teresa of Avila is a methodologically rigorous, tightly organised work. Jones devotes much of each chapter to close descriptions and analyses of each celebration, and the rest to the city’s political background and context. Indeed, one chapter only treats the intricacies of setting up the mission in Portuguese Hormuz, as a preamble to the examination of its Teresian festivities. In this way, Jones repeatedly confirms the message that art and ceremony are essential, even primary tools of political communication, if handled well. The questions facing the Italian Congregation in its Hormuz and Goa missions – whom to court, whom to admit, how to classify religious status, how to handle religious plurality and racial diversity – would become increasingly important and controversial across all parts of early modern Catholicism’s global expansion.

The case of Hormuz offers the book’s best proof of the importance of sacred festivals, and of Teresa of Avila. The mission there was unstable, under-resourced and politically flammable. It would fail within its first decade. Yet during that time, Hormuz’s Discalced Carmelites poured their energy and resources into Teresian festivities above else. This was the tool they most believed would bring them success and convert the most souls. If Teresa could not win people over, nobody could.