Isabelle de Villena

Isabelle de Villena (Isabel de Villena) was born, surely with Valence (Spain), in 1430. It was the natural girl of Henri de Villena, noble Castilian of the house of the Trastamare S. Isabelle was baptized under the name of Elionor Manuel and it was high at the court of, woman of Alphonse V of Aragon, known as Magnanime. In 1445 it pronounced its wishes with the convent of Très Holy Trinity of the Clarisses of Valence, of which it became abbess in 1463.

Sœur Isabelle could gain a reputation of holiness and joins together around it an important circle writers who admired his intellectual height. She is the first woman of letters of the Catalan Littérature whose name is known. She belonged to the Siècle of Catalan Gold, of which she was one representing eminent. She died in the convent even where she spent forty-five years of her life, victim of an epidemic which devastated Valence in 1490, the year even of the exit of Drawing the White from the presses of the printer Nicolas Spindeler.

The only work which one preserved of it is Vita Christi , published in Valence in 1497 by the abbess who succeeded to him.

Vita Christi

As its Latin title indicates it, it is about a life of Jesus-Christ, written with an aim of informing the nuns of its convent. Its originality is due to the way in which the author is able to pour his extraordinary imagination there and to express its female point of view there. So that what was to be a life of Christ is transformed in her hands into a life of the Virgin Mary: the book starts with the birth of the Virgin and ends in her Assomption with the Sky.

The simplicity of the style

What is most remarkable in the style of Isabelle de Villena, it is the use of a very simple language. It voluntarily avoids the erudite words and the literary artifices, seeking the naturalness and intelligibility for the public for which it intended its work.

She opposes the domestic scenes impressed of simplicity to the pump and the solemnity of the celestial ceremonial, which she takes pleasure to describe, enjoying the richness of fabrics, the jewels, the mets and the decoration.

One must also note his control of amplification: it shows indeed a rare skill by writing whole chapters of its book starting from one only verse of the Évangile, then embroidering developments thanks to its extraordinary imagination.

Female work or feminist work?

Femininity is a deliberate choice of Isabelle de Villena; this female sensitivity appears in each page:

the true protagonists of the book are women.
One concerns there the details allotted traditionally to the emotivity of the female character: taste for the use of the diminutives and hypocoristic, the glorification of maternity and tenderness towards the children, vehemence to express the pain, the taste for the domestic life, complicity and the intimacy between women.
the coquettery which appears in the description of the pump and the luxury.

However what caused the most debates it is to know if Isabelle sister wrote a “female” work not only, but “feminist” in addition. It is very delicate to consider feminist a woman having lived in XVe century, but it seems obvious that its work is an answer to the misogyny which impregnates all the medieval literature. Jaume Roig, the author of Espill , the book more the misogynist of the literature of Catalan language, had close links with the convent of the Trinity, of which he was the doctor. Sœur Isabelle was inevitably to know this sulfurous work and the tradition which he claimed to perpetuate, and she wrote her Vita Christi like an answer to the Espill , highlighting female qualities well and showing the perfidy of the charges carried against the women:

the misogynists affirm that the woman is unsteady? : Isabelle sister shows unsteady men and faithful women.
the sexists put in report/ratio the fair sex and the Diable, and quote of bad women? : Isabelle sister considers that the woman is holy, and it presents a string of virtuous women.
It announces throughout its book that Jesus preferred the sex known as weak.
It points out that Christ himself explicitly condemns the misogyny and the misogynists.

If we understand by feminism the defense of the woman, there is hardly doubt that Isabelle de Villena can be regarded as a feminist before the letter.

External bond

'' Speculum Animæ '', of sister Isabel de Villena

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