We do not know the date of Angela’s conversion, or the circumstances which brought it about; save that it took place under Franciscan influence, which was of course paramount in that part of Umbria in her day. It seems to have taken the form of a gradual awakening of conscience to the sinfulness and hypocrisy of her life. In her mental distress she prayed to St. Francis, and he appeared to her in a dream, the earliest of her visionary experiences; the confessor to whom she then went for advice was a Friar Minor, and after her husband’s death she adopted the plain habit worn by the more fervent Tertiaries, and remained faithful to the Order till her death. The fixed dates in her life are few and confusing. Her own book only gives two: the date of her final purification and the date of her death. We gather from this and other sources, however, that after her widowhood she lived at first with one companion in great retirement; but by about 1290, had formed a small sisterhood in Foligno. Its members, who observed Franciscan poverty in its full rigour, took the rule of the Third Order and the three vows of religion, but they were not cloistered. They devoted themselves to the care of the sick, and other works of charity. In this community Angela spent the rest of her life; gradually becoming known as a teacher of “Seraphic wisdom” amongst those Spiritual Franciscans who were struggling to keep the ideals of St. Francis alive. She seems to have been the centre of a group of Franciscan Tertiaries of both sexes, for whom she was at once friend and prophetess, like St. Catherine of Siena in the next century. Several of her letters to these “sons” of hers are embedded in her book of “Evangelical Doctrine.” One of them, the turbulent and ardent friar Ubertino da Casale, owed to her his true initiation into the spiritual life: and his account of the impression which she made on him helps us to understand the nature of her influence. He came to her from Paris in 1298, when he was twenty-five years old; a successful preacher, but already conscious of the inward call to a life of greater perfection. “She restored,” he says, “a thousandfold all those spiritual gifts I had lost through my own sins; so that from that time I have not been the same man that I was before. When I had experienced the splendour of her radiant virtue, she changed the whole face of my mind, and so drove out the weakness and languor from my soul and body and healed my mind that was torn with distraction, that no one who knew me before could doubt that the Spirit of Christ was newly begotten in me through her.” This is almost our only glimpse of Angela as she was seen by contemporary eyes: but it indicates the position she came to occupy among the more devout Franciscan _zelanti_.