Luis de León

Luis de León (1527–1591) was an Augustinian friar, theologian and lyric poet of the School of Salamanca. He entered the Augustinians as a youth and from 1561 held theology chairs at Salamanca, where his Spanish version of the Song of Songs angered Dominican rivals.

In 1572 the Inquisition imprisoned him at Valladolid; acquitted in 1576, he returned to his lecture hall and, as tradition has it, began: ‘As I was saying the other day…’

His treatise The Names of Christ appeared from 1583, and in 1588 he published the first collected edition of Teresa of Ávila's writings. He died in 1591.