The Hermits of Carmel, Remade by a Reforming Nun

The Carmelites began as hermits on a mountain in the Holy Land and were transformed into one of the great contemplative orders by a sixteenth-century Spanish reform that split the order in two.

From Mount Carmel to Europe

The order originated with a group of Latin hermits living on Mount Carmel in the early thirteenth century, for whom Albert of Jerusalem wrote a rule of eremitical life. Driven from the Holy Land by the collapse of the Crusader states, the hermits migrated to Europe and were reconstituted there as mendicant friars, a change of form from solitary contemplation to an active order in the towns that sat uneasily with the eremitical rule they had brought with them. The order kept a strong devotion to the Virgin under the title of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and the practice of the brown scapular.

The Teresian reform

The decisive event in Carmelite history was the reform led by Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross in sixteenth-century Spain, which sought to restore a stricter, more contemplative and enclosed life against the relaxed observance of the day. The reform produced a separate branch, the Discalced Carmelites, distinct from the older Calced observance, so the order divided in two, and it gave the church two of its greatest mystical writers, whose accounts of contemplative prayer became foundational texts of Catholic spirituality. The Carmelites thus combine an ancient eremitical origin with a reform that turned the order into a school of mystical theology.