Reading room

Autobiography (A Pilgrim's Testament)

Ignatius of Loyola

It covers the years from Pamplona (1521) to his arrival in Rome (1538), with a short appendix on the writing of the Exercises and the Constitutions. It is a spiritual autobiography rather than a chronicle: Ignatius selects the episodes in which he learned to read 'the diversity of spirits' —the convalescence at Loyola, the scruples and the illumination at the Cardoner in Manresa, the journey to Jerusalem, the trials at Alcalá and Salamanca, the studies in Paris— and tells them with sobriety, irony and no hagiography. It is the main primary source for his conversion.