Isabel de Villena
(Valencia ?, 1430-1490) Illegitimate daughter of Don Enrique de Villena, Isabel de Villena was perhaps born in Valencia, where she was educated by her aunt, Queen María, wife of Alfonso V of Aragon, since at the age of four she was orphaned.His real name was Elionor Manuel de Villena; she adopted that of Isabel when she entered the monastery of Poor Clare Franciscans of the Holy Trinity in Valencia.
Isabel de Villena
She is the author of a Life of Jesus , written in Valencian for the nuns of her convent, of which she became Prioress in the year 1463.The work is structured around the biography of Jesus of Nazareth and is woven together with a series of detailed comments on the Gospels that show great mastery in the recreation of images destined to move the devotion of the reader.It is a meditation technique taken from the Franciscan spirit of "imitation of Christ", which he must have known from the Meditationes Vitae Christi , by an anonymous author, and from the Vita Christi by Francesc Eiximenis.
Sensitivity and delicacy, evident in a language loaded with diminutives and affective expressions, are some of the characteristics of the text, which also reveals its feminine condition due to the prominent role it gives to women in the narrative of the life of Jesus, a fact that has been interpreted as a reaction to the misogynistic content of L'espill , by Jaume Roig, whom the author could meet given the circumstance that one of her daughters he professed precisely in the convent of the Holy Trinity.
Patristic comments and quotes from classical authors abound in the book, since not in vain Isabel de Villena joined her religious vocation to her love of letters.Scenes and descriptions of parties and banquets and allegorical figures, as in the courtly and chivalric novels of his time, are interspersed with the religious contents of the work.Isabel de Villena died on July 2, 1490 as a result of a plague.
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