Teresa of Avila is a figure in whom contemplative mysticism and practical reform met in a single life. A Carmelite nun in sixteenth-century Spain, she experienced, in mid-life, a "second conversion" and a series of profound mystical states, raptures, visions, and the celebrated experience of the "transverberation," her heart pierced by a seraph's fiery dart, later immortalized in Bernini's sculpture. Rather than withdrawing into private experience, she turned this inner life outward into a demanding programme of reform, founding the Discalced (barefoot) Carmelites, a stricter and more contemplative branch of the order, and travelling Spain to establish new convents against fierce opposition. Her writings, The Way of Perfection, the Life, and above all The Interior Castle, which figures the soul as a crystal castle of seven mansions through which one advances toward union with God at the centre, are classics of spiritual theology, marked by shrewd psychological realism and a plain, vivid style. In 1970 she became the first woman named a Doctor of the Church, a formal recognition that a woman's account of prayer and the soul belonged among the Church's authoritative teaching.