María Coronel y Arana Ágreda

Sor Maria From Agreda, 1602 - 1665

Born in Ágreda, Soria, in 1602, she comes from a noble family. When she is 16, she enters in the order of Saint Frances, in a convent founded by her mother, and in 1627 she becomes the abbes. She becomes famous for the fact of having mystical visions, but it starts a process against her by the Holy Office, but she is absolved. In 1643 she receives the visit of King Felipe IV, and from this time she also becomes his advisor, establishing a huge epistolary relationship until her death, talking about political and theological themes. Her strong influence on the monarch were growing so much, taking the king a lot of decisions from a providential and spiritual perspective. She is the author of “Mística Ciudad de Dios” (Mystical city of God), published after her death, in which is reflected her spiritual thought through a biography of the Holy Mother. She based on the “Apocryphal Gospel”, giving this to the book a heterodox content. This fact made her work to be condemned by the Inquisition and the Sorbonne in 1696. She died in 1665.