Anna Katharina Emmerich

Born in 1774 in Westphalia, she grew up in a poor farming family and entered religious life after years of difficulty finding a convent that would accept her. She eventually joined the Augustinian canonesses at Agnetenberg, but her community was later dissolved during the secular upheavals of the early 19th century.

In the years that followed, she became famous for accounts of mystical visions, severe illness, and the wounds of Christ said to have appeared on her body. The poet Clemens Brentano visited her and wrote down many of the visions she described; these notes later shaped books such as The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ and helped spread her reputation far beyond Germany.

She died in Dülmen in 1824. In the Catholic Church she was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 2004, and she is still remembered as a figure of deep piety whose reported visions have had a lasting influence on popular religious imagination.