At a time when Christianity appeared to be dying out and the Ottoman Empire was aggressively expanding, a young princess was born into obscurity in a remote village in the weak and splintered kingdom of Castile. Speaker Kirstin Downey will take the audience through the story of one of the most significant monarchs of all time; her controversial legacy survives in the 500 million people who speak Spanish as their first language and the 1.3 billion who practice Catholicism.  (From https://www.umw.edu/greatlives/lecture/queen-isabella/)