Emerentia's Vision on Mount Carmel

The story of the mother of Saint Anne, Emerentia, was established in the early sixteenth century as part of an increasing devotional focus on the Holy Kinship, mapping Christ’s family tree back to its origins. The life of Emerentia was included in the Vita gloriosissime matris Anne written by the Carthusian monk Petrus Dorlandus (1454–1507, also called Peter van Diest) which had originally formed a part of the compiled Vita Iesu Christi of Ludolph of Saxony. This was translated from Latin in 1502 by Jodocus Badius (1462-1535) as well as featuring in a sermon given by the German preacher Johann Maier von Eck (1486-1543). The story detailed how Emerentia, a wealthy and pious young woman, frequently made visits to Mount Carmel to visit the sons of the prophets who lived there. She was reluctant to marry until one of the Carmelites had a prophetic vision in which he saw ‘a root from which grew two trees, one had three branches, all bearing flowers, but one a flower more pure and fragrant than all the rest [Christ] ... Then a voice was heard saying: This root is our Emerentia, destined to have great descendants’ (Vita Iesu Christi…, Paris, 1502, in A. Moss, ‘St Anne in Crisis’, in A. MacDonald and M. Twomey (eds.), Schooling and Society: The Ordering and Reordering of Knowledge in the Western Middle Ages, Leuven, 2004, p. 188). Here the kneeling Emerentia, accompanied by two monks in Carmelite habits, gazes upward to a visualised representation of the vision: a tree surmounted by the blessing Christ Child.