Life of the anorexic-stigmatic 'Quaesula' Anna de Torres. Rare.
[Anna de Torres]. Het Leven van de Godtvruchtighe ende Deughtsaeme Anna de Torres Geestelycke Dochter, Salighlijck in den Heere Overleden Binnen Antwerpen, op den 13. Januarii 1698. Antwerp: Hieronymus Verdussen, 1710. 8vo [15.9 x 9.7 cm], [8] ff., [1] f. full-page engraved portrait, 199 pp., [1] p., [4] ff., with woodcut title-page device and woodcut tail-piece. Bound in contemporary sprinkled calf, gold-tooled spine. Spine and boards rubbed and with edge wear, small losses to extremities of spine, but sound. Internally with minor toning, edge wear and the occasional stain, with various marks of ownership on front pastedown and title page (Carmelite Nuns in Mechelen; Trappist Abbey of Notre-Dame de Saint-Rémy in Rochefort; a dweller in the ‘Collegio Ste. Anne’; and a certain L. Verdegem).
Rare (2 U.S. copy: Michigan & Johns Hopkins) first and only edition of the ‘Life’ of the 17th-century anorexic-stigmatic Anna de Torres (1662-98), a native of Dendermonde and the daughter of a Murcian father and Luxembourgish mother. This anonymously authored ‘Life’ is notable for its full-page engraved portrait of Anna made after a drawing of her corpse (“Notice,” p. 45).
Orphaned at an early age, Anna de Torres was raised first by her great uncle and then by her brother, but upon his death she was placed in the Hospital at Lier, where she aligned herself with the ‘pious daughters’ known as the Quaesulae (“Het Lief Heilig Anneken,” p. 94). There she subjected herself to extreme privations, including surviving for 23 weeks on no more food than the bread/body of the eucharist.
Although some at the Hospital saw holiness in her, other saw a demon, and in 1694 she was sent away to Antwerp where she lived in a cell in the house of a priest by the name of Vander Weyden (some have presumed him to be the author of this ‘Life’; see, e.g., “Het Lief Heilig Anneken,” p. 95). In Antwerp Anna de Torres was spiritually directed by the chaplain of Sint-Walburgiskerk. She continued to eat only at communion and soon became marked with the stigmata. Upon her death in 1698, her emaciated body miraculously plumped up and gave the appearance of being a healthy corpse. She was buried at Sint-Walburgiskerk, where a popular cult to her briefly flourished, but official ecclesiastical recognition of her holiness never came to pass. Sint-Walburgiskerk was closed in 1798 (demolished in 1817), and so the body of Anna de Torres was moved to Antwerp’s Sint-Pauluskerk.
Another notable feature of this work is that both its preface and its endnotes are presented in verse.
OCLC and KVK locate 2 U.S. copies (Michigan & Johns Hopkins) of Het Leven van de Godtvruchtighe ende Deughtsaeme Anna de Torres.
*Collated with the Ghent copy; “Notice sur Anne-de-Torres, Fille dévote à Anvers,” Semaine religieuse d’Anvers et de la province, vol. 7, no. 319 (25 Jan. 1879), pp. 43-45; “Het Lief Heilig Anneken,” Rond den Heerd, vol. 4, no. 12 (13 Feb. 1869), pp. 94-96.