Stephana de Quinzanis

Stephana de Quinzanis (also known as Stefana Quinzani or Stephanie de Quinzanis) was an Italian Dominican tertiary and mystic of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, born in 1457 at Orzinuovi on the Lombard plain in what is now the province of Brescia. Her father, Lorenzo de Quinzanis, was himself a member of the Third Order of Saint Dominic and formed her from childhood in Dominican piety. Contemporary accounts describe her as a child of unusual devotion who spent long hours in prayer and showed particular attachment to Saint Thomas Aquinas. At the age of seven she reported a vision of Saint Dominic, who told her that she would wear his habit. She received the tertiary habit around the age of fifteen, remaining in her family household rather than entering a cloistered convent.

Her adult life was marked by intense mystical phenomena recorded by confessors and local chroniclers. She experienced frequent ecstasies and visions of saints, and she also reported violent assaults by demons who, according to those accounts, beat her and sought to turn her from her way of life. She received the stigmata of the Passion of Christ. When her confessor commanded her to pray that the wounds not be visible to others, the exterior marks disappeared, though she continued to suffer the associated pain. She cultivated a deep devotion to the Eucharist and to the sufferings of Christ and practiced the severe fasting and austerities typical of late-medieval Italian mystics.

Stephana maintained a notable spiritual friendship and correspondence with Blessed Osanna Andreasi of Mantua, another Dominican tertiary renowned for mystical gifts. In later life she settled at Soncino, where a group of women of the Third Order gathered around her. The community did not live under a strictly conventual rule, but it became a center of Dominican tertiary life in the region. People of every social condition, including nobles and churchmen, sought her out for spiritual counsel. She was reputed for discernment and intercessory prayer, and her reputation for holiness spread through Lombardy.

She died at Soncino on 2 January 1530. Devotion to her arose soon after her death. On 14 December 1740 Pope Benedict XIV confirmed her ancient cultus, the act that constitutes her beatification in the pre-Congregation sense. She has not been formally canonized. Her liturgical memorial is kept on 2 January. Relatively little survives in the way of writings by Stephana herself; knowledge of her life depends chiefly on the testimony of confessors, local traditions, and the acts assembled for the confirmation of her cult.