Angela was a wealthy Foligno laywoman who married young, bore children, and (by her own ferocious description in her later confessions) lived a worldly, vain, and self-indulgent life. Around 1285, in her late thirties, she underwent a sudden conversion at a confession to a Franciscan friar named Arnaldo — possibly her cousin — at the shrine of St. Francis at Assisi.
Over the following few years, in quick succession, her mother, her husband, and all her children died — a fact she initially regarded (with extraordinary candor recorded in the Memoriale) as an answer to her prayers for freedom to pursue God. She gave away her wealth, joined the Franciscan Third Order in 1291, gathered around her a community of Franciscan tertiaries, and began the series of mystical experiences that her confessor Arnaldo recorded as the Memoriale and the Instructiones.
Her writings — the Liber de Vere Fidelium Experientia ('Book of the Experience of the Truly Faithful') in two parts — are among the most ferocious and unsparing of all medieval mystical texts. The 'thirty steps' she traces from conversion through the abyss of self-knowledge to the unitive vision of the Trinity, and her famous description of the experience of God as ineffable Darkness ('I had no eyes for the visible world; nothing seemed to me anything but the Trinity'), made her one of the principal mystical theologians of the late medieval Latin tradition. The medieval Franciscans called her Magistra Theologorum, 'Mistress of Theologians.' Pope Francis (a Franciscan-formed pope of her order) extended her feast to the universal Church in 2013.