In her spiritual autobiography El Libro de la Vida (The Book of the [my]
Life, or--punningly--The Book of Life) Teresa of Avila tells us that in early child-
hood she and her little brother ran away from home: "We planned to go to the
country of the Moors, seeking it for the love of God, so that there they would
behead us" (4).

We can see all the history of the Spanish attitudes to the Moors in this
account. At least Teresa and her brother were not planning to fight but only to
die, not recognizing that the martyrdom in Spain had been endured by the Moors
themselves. Yet as well as the conscious desire for martyrdom Teresa's account
offers some sense of the attraction of the mysterious tierra de moros; the exotic
other place exercises its own fascination.

As well as saints' lives, a major source for the young Teresa's knowledge of
the Moors would have been the novels of chivalry. We know she read these--
and thus, almost all the novels extant in Spanish. Her mother, she tells us with
some disapproval, was aficionada a libros de caballerías and from this aficionada Te-
resa herself caught the love of books of chivalry. Teresa read as much and as many
as possible: "and it seemed to me no evil to waste many hours of the day and of

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