Life of the Pious Anna Katharina Emmerich. Modernized Edition (Translated) #1010859

This edition includes:
• New English translation in a modernized edition
• Critical introduction

A peasant girl from Westphalia who bore the wounds of Christ in her body and spoke for years of what she saw: Anna Katharina Emmerich is one of the most compelling figures in Christian mysticism, and her story still unsettles and fascinates everyone who meets it.

This is the biography in which her life was set down. Karl Erhard Schmöger follows her from a poor farmstead near Koesfeld to the Augustinian convent at Dülmen, through years of illness, poverty and quiet penance, and into the visions that filled her final years in a single small room. Clemens Brentano, the Romantic poet who sat at her bedside, filled notebooks with her contemplations of the Passion of Christ and of sacred history; from those notebooks, and from his own research, Schmöger built a full account of a woman who asked to carry the sufferings of others and who was said to see into the hidden state of souls.

This modernized edition presents Schmöger's Life in the language of today: the text rewritten for readers now, free in form and faithful in substance, so that every part of its matter — her world, her words, her visions — arrives whole. The volume opens with a critical introduction that traces how the book came to be, from Brentano's notebooks to Schmöger's editorial work, and asks what this life of suffering, sanctity and intercession can still say to us. Anna Katharina Emmerich was beatified in 2004, and readers keep seeking her out: for her visions of the Passion and of the Church, for the strange beauty of her inner world, and for a way of understanding pain that refuses to treat it as meaningless.

Take this volume into your library and let one of the great mystical lives speak for itself.