Isabelle de Villena

1430-1490 15th century

Prayer given back to the women who already carried it, and were no longer heard.

Who was Isabelle de Villena?

Abbess of the Poor Clares of the Trinity in Valencia for nearly forty years, she wrote in Catalan a Vita Christi in which it is the women of the Gospel who speak, and at length, rather than the doctors: Mary, Anna the prophetess, Mary Magdalene. The book was printed in 1497, after her death, at the request of Queen Isabella.

In their own words

Let me touch and handle the one my soul loves: all my life I have desired him, all my life I have hungered for him.

Vita Christi, ch. LXXVIII, the words of Anna the prophetess; ed. Ramon Miquel i Planas, Barcelona, 1916, vol. I, p. 309; Catalan « Toque y palpe aquell qui ama la mia anima : tota la mia vida lo he desijat e famejat », translated by the Manna team