The Notebooks of Maria Valtorta

In 1942 Maria Valtorta, already infirm for eight years and looking for a spiritual director, receives a visit from Father Migliorini, a pious Servite priest, who becomes her confessor and asks her, the following year, to write her memoirs. Semi-seated in bed, with her notebook on the bedstead raised by her arched legs, Maria writes with a fountain pen , filling 761 pages at once, after declaring to her spiritual father that she wants to bare her conscience in saying all the good and all the bad. She believes she has nothing more to say and do, and instead the Autobiography, written in the spring of 1943, is only the first of her works.

On 23 April of the same year, Good Friday, a Voice already known to his spirit dictates a page of divine wisdom to Mary. She confides in the faithful Martha and asks her to go and call Father Migliorini, who does not wait. After the confiding and confidential conversation with his assistant, he begins to supply her with notebooks. Maria Valtorta transforms chronic infirmity into prodigious industriousness. She writes without ever being able to move from her bed, at any hour of the day or night, even amidst excruciating suffering but always sweetened by superhuman spiritual joy. At the centre of his literary production is the great work written from 1944 to 1947 and completed with the last episodes in 1951. It is published in ten volumes under the title The Gospel as it was revealed to me. The writer interspersed its chapters with various writings that formed, with the first of 1943, the works considered minor, published in five volumes. Book of Azaria is the book of lessons, attributed to the angel Azaria, on the readings (excluding the Gospel) of the Sunday and festive Masses celebrated from 24 February 1946 to 2 February 1947. Lectures onPaul’s Epistle to the Romans are 48 lectures on passages from the Pauline Epistle, attributed to the Holy Spirit and written in various months during the years 1948 and 1950.

Notebooks of 1943

Quaderni, finally, is the generic title of three volumes that collect in chronological order – The Notebooks of 1943 the first, The Notebooks of 1944 the second, The Notebooks of 1945-1950 the third – all the remaining writings, which are of a biblical, hagiographic, prophetic, ascetic nature, also with autobiographical references, together with other descriptions of the Gospels and scenes of the early Christian martyrs. The third volume of the Notebooks ends with a commentary on passages from the first four chapters of the book of Revelation. All three volumes are accompanied by a table of contents, a thematic index and a biblical index.

Beginning with the year 1944, the dates of each of the writings in the second and third volumes of the Notebooks often intersect with the dates Maria Valtorta put to the parts that make up her other works. The editor-publisher has indicated in the volumes of the Notebooks the dates not given because they belong to the writing of the parts or chapters of other works. Thus the volumes of the Notebooks record Maria Valtorta’s daily literary production.