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Biography

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Maria Petyt, known in religion as Maria of Saint Teresa, was a Flemish Catholic mystic and spiritual writer of the seventeenth century. She was born on 31 January 1623 in Hazebrouck, in the County of Flanders, then part of the Spanish Netherlands (the town lies in present-day northern France). She came from a Catholic family of comfortable means and received an education that later enabled her to compose a substantial body of spiritual writing in Dutch. From youth she was drawn to prayer and to a consecrated life, though she did not become a choir nun in a cloistered monastery.

She was received into the Third Order of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and placed herself under the direction of the Carmelite friar Michael of Saint Augustine (Jan van Weert), a spiritual author of the Flemish Carmel of the Ancient Observance. Under his guidance she adopted the life of a recluse attached to the Carmelite community in Mechelen, combining the canonical status of a lay tertiary with enclosure, liturgical prayer, meditation, and asceticism. Her interior life was shaped by the Carmelite school of Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross as well as by the older mystical traditions of the Low Countries, and it was marked by strong Marian and eucharistic devotion, together with reported visions, locutions, and prolonged physical illness.

At her director’s request she wrote a spiritual autobiography and related texts describing the stages of her interior path, her trials, and her understanding of union with God and abandonment to the divine will. After her death these papers were edited and published by Michael of Saint Augustine; they remain the principal source for her life and teaching and situate her among the documented women mystics of the Catholic Reformation in the Spanish Netherlands.

Maria Petyt died in Mechelen on 1 November 1677. She has not been beatified or canonized by the Catholic Church, and she has no official feast day or recognized patronages in the universal calendar. Subsequent interest in her has been mainly among historians of Carmelite spirituality and of seventeenth-century religious literature in the Low Countries.

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