"In the End, God Helped Me Defeat Myself": The Spiritual Life of Camilla Battista Da Varano

Over the course of about two weeks in 1491, Camilla Battista da Varano (1458--1524) composed a spiritual life story tracing her religious devotion from the age of eight to the age of thirty-three.  In the text, she described her relationship with a number of men, including her father and several clerics who—to one degree or another—inspired and guided her devotional life.  By the time she wrote, she had been a professed Franciscan nun for seven years.  She described herself at that point as one who had undergone visionary, mystical experiences, and as a woman who had both benefitted and suffered under the control of men like her father and her spiritual directors.  In this text, and in other of her devotional treatises, she claimed the ability to provide spiritual direction of her own, and wrote in bold imagery.  She exercised a do-it-yourself approach to discernment of God’s will, and even to the process of confession.  She criticized inattentive spiritual directors and asserted that both her visions and the impetus for her devotional writings came directly, unmediated, from God.  But Camilla also exhibited deferential, self deprecating attitudes, and strong connections to traditional Franciscan theology.  She also wrote at times with vivid expressions of obedience to the variety of men who held some authority over her.  The standard images usually associated with late medieval and early modern women will not account for the complexity of the messages Camilla delivered in her text.