Sor Isabel de Villena, her Vita Christi and an Example of Gendered Immaculist Writing in the Fifteenth Century

Abstract

This single authored article was an invited contribution to the journal from guest editors, Dawn Bratsch-Prince and Montserrat Piera. The article addresses how and why Isabel de Villena’s 'Vita Christi' is a unique piece of gendered writing. It challenges the commonly held idea that Isabel’s novelesque style represents her longing for a past life at court. It establishes the manner and purpose of Villena’s writing by examining both contemporary views of her writing included in the text as a prologue, written by her successor abbess, and it examines her writing techniques, particularly the way in which she embeds her nuns’ experience in the story of Christ. The article demonstrates how Villena, an Immaculist writer, constructs her text to draw together celebration of the conception and birth of the Virgin and contemporary celebration in the convent. When this article appeared, Twomey was the only Anglo-Saxon scholar working on Villena’s writing, which has not been widely studied.