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Juana de Mendoza was a Spanish duchess who entered the Discalced Carmelite order as a widow in 1619 and remained until her death in 1653. This article examines the pious donations this duchess-nun ordered just before she took vows and after she sued her own son for the control of the family patrimony. It shows the delicate and complex position she assumed in order to balance, articulate and adjust her worldly needs and obligations and her spiritual reputation, far from the traditional contradiction between the sacred and the profane, the spiritual and the temporal. Based on her testament, on the accounts of her pious foundations and on judicial archives, this study analyses her specific ways of giving (the kind of the donations, their amount, their frequency and rhythms, the networks they mobilize) and what they indicate about her desire and capacity to control the image she displayed to her contemporaries, which was profoundly ambivalent.