The last of the women of this century who deserves to be mentioned and without whom indeed any account of the century would be quite incomplete is probably the greatest of all the women of the period and perhaps the greatest intellectual woman who ever lived. The end of the chapter brings us back to Spain to Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada, whom the world knows as St. Teresa. It is true that most of her work was accomplished after the close of the century, but as she was born in 1515 and was therefore thirty-five years of age before Columbus' Century closed, receiving all of her training and formation of mind in the great Renaissance period, her place is naturally in this epoch. She is the most important {308} of the women of the Renaissance, though this is seldom realized, and her reputation instead of decreasing with the years has rather increased. Even within the last twenty years a number of lives of her was written in every language in Europe and no less than a dozen of them have appeared in English. The feminists of the modern time have turned to her as one of the great representative women of all time. It is worth while recording some of the great tributes to her. Her own Spanish compatriots call her lovingly their Doctor of the Church. At Rome at the entrance of the Vatican Basilica where appear in marble the Fathers and the Doctors of the Church you will see one single statue raised to a woman and bearing this inscription, _"Mater Spiritualium"_--Mother of Things Spiritual. It is the statue of Teresa who has been gloriously proclaimed the Mother of Spirituality, the Mistress of Mystical Theology and practically a Doctor of the Church, in the principles of the spiritual life. The French and the Spanish are almost at opposite poles in their critical appreciations, yet Teresa has been honored almost as much in France as in her native country. Men so different as Bossuet and Fénelon have united in proclaiming her their teacher in the science of the saints and have declared her books, "The Way of Perfection," "The Castle of the Soul," "The Book of Foundations" and "Spiritual Advice," the most wonderful contributions to human knowledge that have ever been made. Nor was her appeal only to the Latin races in Europe. The German mystics have always found a special attraction in St. Teresa's work and this was true not only among the Catholic students in Germany, but also at nearly all times among the Protestants. In the modern time Teresa has been the subject of many monographs by German writers.