The Dolorous Passion has taken its place among the most famous of the visions recorded in Catholic spiritual writing. The visionary was a poor Westphalian girl, Anne Catherine Emmerich, born 1774, who became an Augustinian nun at Dulmen in 1803, and died in 1824. She had been remarkable from childhood not only for the great charity that animated her, but for the ecstasies that visited her, and some years after entering the religious state she began to show the stigmata. Many people came to see her, and ecclesiastical commissions examined her case and declared the manifestations genuine. Among those who visited her was the poet Clemens Brentano and it was the who took down from her lips the accounts, extraordinary in their vividness, of what she saw when she felt herself transported to the time and place of Our Lord’s Passion.