Blessed Osanna of Mantua

Osanna d'Andreasi, Mystic and Spiritual Adviser

(born 17 January 1449)

Born in Carbonara di Po, near Mantua, on 17 January 1449, Osanna d'Andreasi was the daughter of Niccolò Andreasi and his wife, Agnese Gonzaga. Her family belonged to the nobility, but whether Agnese Gonzaga was related to the Gonzaga family, rulers of Mantua from the mid-fourteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, is not clear.

Francesco Bonsignore,
Veneration of the Beata Osanna Andreasi,
1519 

In writing about the Blessed Osanna of Mantua, Benedict Ashley, O.P. notes the influence of Catherine of Siena upon the fifteenth-century mystic: 

St. Catherine of Siena provided Dominicans, especially Italians, with a new model of spirituality which was not only mystical but political, directly concerned with the reform of Church and State. A century after her death this model was strikingly exemplified by Dominican men . . . but comparatively little attention has been given to Dominican women . . . who just as faithfully followed in Catherine’s footsteps. One of these on whom we are best informed is Osanna D’Andreasi.

Osanna's life and faith are documented by two contemporaries who knew her and who wrote about her shortly after her death: the first of these biographies, Beatae Osannae Mantuanae de tertio habitu ord. Fratrum praedicatorum vita, was written in 1505 by the Dominican scholar Sylvester of Ferrara.

Two years later, another life, Libretto de la vita et transit de la b . Or . from Mantua, was completed by her confidante, Father Girolamo (Jerome) de Monte Oliveto, a Benedictine monk whom Osanna would come to consider her "spiritual son." His biography is comprised of extended accounts of Osanna's spiritual experiences, relayed to him through conversation. He also appended twenty-four letters by Osanna to his account of her life. 

According to Jerome, Osanna's mystical experiences began when she was quite young, although she kept them to herself. At the age of five or six, while walking along the Po River, she had her first vision, of an angel who raised her to heaven, telling her, “To enter Heaven it is necessary to love God very much: See how all created things sing His glory and proclaim it to men.” 

In the same spot, she later experienced a vision of Jesus as a child wearing a crown of thorns, and later still met him again, this time in the family garden. Called to the religious life, the girl was said to have begged her father to let her study theology--when denied, she received instruction from the Virgin Mary herself. And since her father didn't think that, as a girl, she needed to learn to read and write, another legend says that--like Catherine of Siena--she miraculously recognized the words "Jesus" and "Mary" one day, and from that point on, she could read.

Osanna d'Andeasi's desire for a religious life did not conform to her family's plans for her. When she was fourteen years old, she discovered that her father was arranging a marriage for her; although she did not defy him by joining the Dominicans, she did assume the the habit of a Dominican tertiary and told her father that she had vowed to wear it until she was allowed to enter the religious life.*

When she was eighteen, she experienced yet another vision in which she experienced a mystical marriage to Jesus. For the following twelve years, while the Italian city-states suffered invasion and war, she prayed to be able to share in the sufferings of Jesus. At the same time, she assumed the burden of caring for her many brothers and sisters after her parents' deaths. 

In addition to experiencing visions, Osanna Andreasi received the stigmata, first on her head, then her side, then her feet. As Ashley describes the particular of these manifestations in Osanna's case, "the stigmata do not seem to have bled, but simply to have appeared as red, intensely painful swellings. She kept them hidden from everyone except her servants, but at times the pain in her feet was so great that she was unable to walk."

Ippolito Andreasi,
The Assumption with the Blessed Osanna Andreasi,
c. 1575

Her piety, her acts of charity, and her spiritual experiences brought her to the attention not only of the people, who began to look to her as a spiritual adviser, but also to the ruling Gonzaga family, in particular to Isabella d'Este, marchesa of Mantua, for whom Osanna Andreasi became a spiritual adviser.

In 1501, after waiting thirty-seven years, Osanna  was finally able to take her vows as a Dominican tertiary. She died four years later, on 18 June 1505. In 1515, at the request of Isabella d'Este, Pope Leo X established a feast day for Osanna in Mantua. She was beatified by Innocent XII in 1694. 

Today Blessed Osanna of Mantua's remains are enshrined in Mantua, in the Cattedrale di San Pietro apostolo. There is also a museum dedicated to her in Mantua--you can see a gallery of images of the House of the Blessed Osanna by clicking here.

In addition to Ashley's "Blessed Osanna d’Andreasi and Other Renaissance Italian Dominican Women Mystics," cited above, there is an account of Blessed Osanna of Mantua in Short Lives of the Dominican Saints" (the author of which is, no kidding, given as "A Sister of the Congregation of St. Catharine of Siena). 

You may also enjoy Sally Anne Hickson's essay, "Popular Devotion: Isabella d'Este, Blessed Osanna and Depictions of Female Sanctity in Mantua," in her Women, Art and Architectural Patronage in Renaissance Mantua: Matrons, Mystics and Monasteries 

*Like the Franciscans, the Dominicans also had a "third order": those who, for a variety of reasons, could not take formal vows to join a religious order, could live as a lay person, outside the community according to the ways of life of those who live inside. 

Teresa of Ávila: Nun, Mystic, Theologian

Teresa of Ávila (feast day, 15 October)

Born on 28 March 1515, Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda y Ahumada would become one of the most well-known and revered of early-modern religious figures: she was beatified in 1614, some thirty years after her death, and canonized just a few years later, on 12 March 1622. On 27 September 1970, Pope Paul VI named her as a Doctor of the Church.* 

Teresa of Ávila, age sixty-one,

a copy of a portrait painted from life in 1576

Although she was the pious daughter of pious parents, the young Teresa was also drawn to romantic tales of knightly adventure, the pleasures of spending time with her friends, and caring for her appearance.

But after the death of her mother, when Teresa was fifteen, and then of her eldest sister, she was sent to an Augustinian convent. She spent eighteen months there, but as a result of an illness, she returned home.

She eventually decided to return to a religious life--as the safest kind of life--and joined the Carmelite Convent of the Incarnation in Ávila on 2 November 1535. 

Once again she suffered a severe illness (probably malaria), but she also began experiencing a series of ecstatic visions, the most famous of which she would later describe in her Autobiography:

I saw in [an angel's] hand a long spear of gold, and at the point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it.

Like many of the religious women we've encountered this year, Teresa found life in the convent not rigorous enough. In addition to her role as a visionary, she became a reformer, founding a new, more rigorous Carmelite rule, one focused on absolute poverty, self-flagellation, and rigid asceticism. The Discalced (or shoeless) Carmelite Nuns of the Primitive Rule of St. Joseph was founded in Ávila in 1562. 

Then the visionary and reformer became a builder: traveling throughout Spain, she established convents in Medina del Campo (1567), Malagon and Valladolid (1568), Toledo and Pastrana (1569), Salamanca (1570), Alba de Tormes (1571), Segovia (1574), Veas and Seville (1575), and Caravaca (1576). She describes this frenetic activity--as well as the opposition she encountered everywhere--in her Book of Foundations.

In addition to her autobiography, El Libro de su vida (Life Written by Herself), completed before 1567, Teresa wrote a series of works for the women who wished to live a religious life. El camino de perfección (The Way of Perfection), written about 1566, was intended to show her readers the way to achieve their spiritual goals.

Her most well-known work, El castillo interior or Las moradas (The Interior Castle or The Mansions) was probably completed between 1577 and 1580--in this work, she instructs her readers in contemplative prayer, leading them through stages of an interior exploration. Libro de las Fundaciones (The Book of Foundations), begun in 1573 and completed in 1582, was written as a history of the order and of its growing number of established institutions. She also composed poems and prayers. More than 400 letters, whole and fragmentary, survive.

Teresa died at the age of sixty-seven on 4 October 1582 in Salamanca.

You can access all of her works online--you might start with what's available at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library by clicking here.

While Teresa does tell the story of her own life in her autobiography, for a good scholarly introduction to the woman and her work, neither a hagiographical view or a romanticized one, I recommend Cathleen Medwick's Teresa of Avila: The Progress of a Soul.

*She was recognized along with Catherine of Siena, the two becoming the first two women to be named as Doctors of the Church. Thérèse of Lisieux, recognized in 1997, and Hildegard of Bingen, in 2012, are the only two other women so identified.

Margery Kempe Tells Her Story

Margery Kempe (in Rome, 7 October 1414)

In the account of her life that she says was completed in 1436, the English mystic and pilgrim Margery Kempe tells of her visit to Rome, where on 7 October 1414, she says she visits the "chamber that Saint Bridget died in" and then "kneeled on the stone on which our Lord appeared to Saint Bridget."

A page from the mid-fifteenth century
manuscript copy of Margery Kempe's
Boke (now BL Add. 61823) 

Margery Kempe's "autobiography," which includes this reference to Birgitta of Sweden, is compelling, challenging, at times deeply moving, sometimes hilarious, and, in the end, unforgettable, as is Kempe herself. 

But I found myself at a complete loss the first time a selection from Kempe was included in the Norton Anthology of British Literature some time in the late 80s or in the early 90s--so much at a loss, in fact, that although I wanted to include women writers in the survey course I was teaching, I freaked out and asked a friend who taught theology to do the brief selection from Kempe for me. She spent an hour talking to a room full of bored students about the "gift of tears," we all got through the period, and then we turned the page. 

But in the years since, I've taught Margery Kempe's book many times--not just a couple of short pages in the Norton anthology but her entire work. With each rereading and each group of students, I grew to love it--and Kempe herself--more and more. 

It horrified me--not to mention my students--when I realized in class one day that Kempe reminded me of my mother: absolutely impossible to deal with, completely unpredictable, a horror and an embarrassment to her fellow travelers, including her husband, always making a spectacle of herself (to use one of my mother's favorite phrases, invariably applied to someone else), and supremely confident in the correctness her own opinions, decisions, and pronouncements. Kempe is garrulous, attention-seeking, and funny, both repellent and endearing. 

Margery Brunham was born in the port city of Bishop's Lynn (now King's Lynn) in Norfolk about the year 1373. She married John Kempe when she was about twenty, and she tells us that she gives birth to fourteen children. (Though my students were always shocked that this mother wrote almost nothing about any of her children--they thought her children would--or should--be the focus of Kempe's life.)

After a terrible period of mental and physical collapse following the birth of her first child, she begins to experience a series of marvelous visions of Jesus, who sits on her bed and comforts her. Other visions follow--she is with St. Anne at the birth of the Virgin Mary, bustling about to take care of the newborn and then looking after her "until she was twelve years of age." She is with Mary in Bethlehem, finding "lodgings for her every night," begging for "fair white cloth and kerchiefs" in which to swaddle the infant Jesus, begging for food for the mother and child.

Margery Kempe negotiates with her husband to end their sex life (at first he refuses, threatening to rape her, but eventually, after she promises to pay his debts, he agrees), she is arrested and examined about her religious views, she undertakes pilgrimages (throughout England, to Rome, to St. James Compostela, to the Holy Land, to Germany), she composes her autobiography, she cares for her dying husband, and, by 1438, she is dead.

It's easy to regard Kempe's book as the rambling, disorganized reflections of a madwoman--as Lynn Staley notes, when the manuscript copy of Kempe's Book was first recovered and identified, "it was taken as a sort of verbal diary, narrated by a possibly hysterical, certainly emotional, woman." But in the intervening years, it has come to be recognized as carefully "authored," the "product of a shaping imagination."

Having read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, where the greatest of English storytellers creates a fictional version of himself as a genial boob, gullible, naive, and a terrible teller of stories, student-readers can see the way Margery Kempe also constructs a version of herself, whom she refers to in the third-person as "this creature." 

A page from Wynken de Worde's
1501 pamphlet of extracts from
Margery Kempe's Boke

Margery Kempe's Boke is widely regarded today as the first autobiography written in English, but that is not the way she saw her work.

Kempe identifies her "book" as a "treatise"--well, actually as "a short treatise" or a "little treatise." It can also be read as a confessio--like Augustine's Confessions, a literary and public revelation of what has been hidden--or an account of mystical revelations, or even a travelogue. 

Kempe's work survives in only one manuscript copy, from the mid-fifteenth century, that at one time belonged to the Carthusian monks of Mount Grace Priory (in Yorkshire). A seven-page extract was printed by Wynken de Worde in 1501 as A shorte treatyse of contemplacyon taught by our lorde Ihesu cryste, or taken out of the boke of Margerie Kempe of Lynn. It was reprinted by Henry Pepwell in 1521--at that time, Pepwell decided that Margery Kempe was a "devout anchoress." 

Those few pages were all that had ever come to light until 1934, when the manuscript was "discovered" by Lieutenant-Colonel W. Butler Bowdon among his family archives.

There is a great deal of wonderful critical commentary on Kempe and her book, but I love a comment one of my students, Jordan, made the last time I read this book for class: Margery Kempe's book is about "a lost soul that finds its way."

In yet another marvel of technology, the British Library has made available a digitized copy of the mid-fifteenth-century manuscript; you can access it by clicking here. There are two wonderful paperback editions--I've quoted from Lynne Staley, who has produced a Norton Critical Edition text of The Book of Margery Kempe. I also recommend B. A. Windeatt's Penguin edition (which I've used in class so many times that it's falling apart, but I can't bear to part with it). 

Beatrice of Nazareth: "Absorbed in the Abyss of Love"

Beatrice of Nazareth (feast day, 29 July)

The woman who became known as Beatrice of Nazareth was born about the year 1200 in Tienen, a town near the Flemish city of Leuven, to a relatively wealthy father, Bartholomew, a man known for his piety. She was the youngest of six children, educated at first by her mother--and the young Beatrice was recognized as "a prodigy of learning."

Stained glass depiction of
Beatrice of Nazareth,
Cistercian Abbey of Brecht,
the "official continuation"
of the monastery of Nazareth

After her mother's death, when Beatrice was about aged seven, her father sent her to a community of beguines at Zoutleeuw so "that she might more freely make progress in virtue."* While there she also attended a town school, open to both boys and girls, where she was trained in the seven liberal arts.

Called home by her father about a year later, Beatrice asked to join a religious order, and so, about the year 1210, when she was ten years old, she became an oblate at the Cistercian convent at Bloemendaal. She became a novitiate when she was about fifteen years old, and soon thereafter she was professed as a nun.

In 1216, the abbess of Bloemendaal sent her to the Cistercian community of Rameya to learn how to write liturgical manuscripts. At Rameya she developed a close spiritual friendship with the visionary Ida of Nivelles.

In January of 1217, under Ida's direction, Beatrice experienced her first mystical vision; as it was described by her contemporary biographer, "Beatrice, with devout meditation, praise, thanksgiving and all humility followed the Son as he ascended right up to the Father's presence." This is a vision seen "not with bodily but with intellectual eyes, with eyes not of the flesh but of the mind." 

Shortly after this experience, she returned to Blomendaal, where her father, two brothers, and two sisters had become lay members of the community. When a daughter community was founded in 1221, her family moved to the new Maagendal house, and Beatrice eventually joined them there, perhaps in 1221, perhaps later. Whenever she moved to Maagendal, she remained there until 1236 when she transferred to the new Cistercian convent of Nazareth, which gave her her name, Beatrice of Nazareth. She was elected prioress and remained there until her death in 1268.

A fourteenth-century Brussels
ms. of Beatrice of Nazareth's
The Seven Manners of Loving

For twenty years, from about 1215 until 1235, Beatrice is known to have kept a spiritual journal, now lost. In Nazareth, a Vita Beatricis (life of Beatrice) was written, and this document preserves much of the detail of Beatrice's life.

In Nazareth she also composed her own text, The Seven Manners of Loving--which religious historian Bernard McGinn regards as "a powerful exploration" of the most important themes "of the women mystics of northern Europe in the thirteenth century."

Beatrice of Nazareth is venerated as the Blessed Beatrice, her feast day celebrated on 29 July.

There is an excellent discussion of Beatrice of Nazareth as a mystic in McGinn's The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism, 1200-1350, volume 3 of his History of Western Christian Mysticism. In addition, Fione Bowles's volume in the Spiritual Classics series, Beguine Spirituality: Mystical Writings of Mechthild of Magdeburg, Beatrice of Nazareth, and Hadewijch of Brabant, offers a good introduction to her work.

You can read Beatrice of Nazareth's Seven Manners of Loving by clicking here.

*As we have seen, the Beguines were a lay religious movement--Beguines like Marie of Oignies and Mechthild of Magdeburg were not associated with any religious order, nor did they live in any officially sanctioned community. They lived an ascetic, spiritual life, devoting themselves to poverty and chastity, working among the poor and ill and modeling their lives on the life of Jesus. 

Birgitta of Sweden: Celestial Revelations

Birgitta of Sweden (died 23 July 1373)

The life of Birgitta Birgersdotter changed radically in 1344. Before that date, she lived a pious but conventional life as daughter, wife, and mother. After 1344, her life was utterly unconventional.

A late fifteenth-century depiction of
St. Birgitta of Sweden

Born about the year 1303, Birgitta was the daughter of Birger Persson, a wealthy landowner and member of a prominent family, who was also a governor and provincial judge in Uppland, a province on the eastern coast of Sweden. Her mother was Birger Perssons's second wife, Ingeborg Bengtsdotter, who had equally illustrious connections, both to the Swedish monarchy, and to Birger Magnusson of Bjälbo, the founder of the city of Stockholm.

Birgitta would later claim that she had begun experiencing mystical visions when she was seven and that she had wished to join a religious order. But her father did not want his daughter to enter a convent, and after the death of Ingeborg Bengtsdotter, about the year 1314, Birger Persson decided to arrange a politically advantageous marriage for his daughter. So in 1316, Birgitta was married to Ulf Gudmarsson, lord of Närke, and she would spend much, though not all, of their twenty-eight-year marriage at his castle at Ulvâsa in Östergötland.

Birgitta happily discovered her husband was as dedicated to his faith as she was. Over the course of the next three decades, Birgitta would live the life of a wife and mother--although one who was also devout and dedicated to performing works of charity. Despite some accounts of her life that focus on her avoidance of "marital pleasure," Birgitta gave birth to eight children, four sons and four daughters. She was also called to court of King Magnus Eriksson after his 1335 marriage to Blanche of Namur. 

Birgitta would enter the second phase of her life in 1344, after her husband's death. Now in her forties, a widow, and freed from childbearing and childrearing, she could devote herself to the religious life that had been denied her earlier. 

She became a practicing ascetic, like many of the religious women we have already seen, denying herself food and subjecting herself to a variety of penitential acts. Her visionary experiences returned; after her death, her confessor recorded some six hundred of her revelations in Latin as Revelationes coelestes ("celestial revelations").  

Not content to join an established religious order, Birgitta founded her own religious community, probably in the year 1346. Originally known as the Order of St. Saviour, it later became known as the the Brigittines, an order that included joint communities of both monks and nuns. Its chief monastery was at Vadstena, in Östergötland, a gift from Magnus of Sweden. 

A detail from a prayer book, c. 1500,
St. Birgitta of Sweden

In 1349, seeking approval for her new order, Birgitta traveled to Rome, accompanied by one of her sons and her daughter, Catherine, about whom I posted earlier this year. Although the order would not receive papal approval until August 1370, Birgitta decided to remain in Rome (though she did undertake occasional pilgrimages, including one to the Holy Land in 1372). She died in Rome on 23 July 1373.

After Birgitta's death, her daughter Catherine returned to Sweden with her mother's body. Birgitta was buried in the monastery she had founded in Vadstena. Catherine continued her mother's work in the monastery and with the Briggitine order, though she ultimately returned to Rome to work for Birgitta's canonization, which took place on 7 October 1391. (While in Rome, Catherine developed a close relationship with a woman we have met before, Catherine of Siena.) 

And as a further note: St. Birgitta of Sweden's daughter, Catherine, was herself canonized, in 1484, as St. Catherine of Sweden. Like her mother, Catherine had been married, but her husband died while she was in Rome with her mother. Birgitta's granddaughter Ingegerd, the child of Birgitta's daughter Margareta, became the first official abbess of Vadstena Abbey in 1388. (Unfortunately, she was accused of forgery, embezzlement, and breaking her vows of chastity and removed as abbess in 1403. Oops. But she remained a member of the community until her death in 1412, and in the end her sins were forgiven.)

For a short biography, I'll link you here to the online Encyclopedia Britannica entry. A longer biography, available here, via the Encyclopedia of World Biograhy, is also quite good. There are many editions of her Revelations and prayers available, but I like Classics of Western Spirituality text, Birgitta of Sweden: Life and Selected Writings.

Blessed Margareta Ebner, Nun and Visionary

Margareta Ebner (died 20 June 1351)

Born in southeastern Germany (Swabia) in 1291, Margareta Ebner was a member of an aristocratic family and well-educated. Without any of the opposition or controversy that many young women experienced before entering into a religious life, Ebner joined the Dominican nuns at the convent of Maria Medingen, near the Bavarian town of Dillingen, probably around the year 1305. She spent the rest of her life there. 

The tomb of Margareta Ebner,
convent of Maria Medingen

From 1312, she suffered a series of traumatic, debilitating illnesses--at times she experienced bouts of uncontrollable laughter and tears that lasted for days at a time, while at other times she was bedridden, occasionally for months at a time. 

However, as Bernard McGinn notes, her illnesses became "the occasion, even the stimulus, for her conversion to a deeper mystical life of devotion."

In 1315, her "mystical life" began; she would later record these experiences in her Revelations, "a kind of mystical journal, or autohagiographical narrative." She was encouraged by the priest Henry of Nördlingen, a spiritual adviser with whom she exchanged letters (fifty-six of his letters to her survive; unfortunately, only one of hers, to him, survives). 

Ebner began the process of composing her Revelations in 1344 and completed her task in 1348. She died on 20 June 1351. 

Interestingly, Nördlingen not only provided the impetus for Ebner's recording of her visionary experiences, he also translated the beguine Mechthild of Magdeburg's The Flowing Light of the Godhead into Middle High German and sent a copy to Ebner. (The original seems to have been written in Mechthild's Middle Low German; it had then been translated into Latin.) 

Henry of Nördlingen also correspond with, visited, and inspired the Dominican nun, mystic, and writer Christina Ebner (1277-1356)--to whom he also gave a copy of Mechthild's The Flowing Light of the Godhead. With his encouragement, Christina Ebner began a correspondence with Margareta Ebner--despite sharing a name, their religious order, and their mystical experiences, the two are not related.

Margareta Ebner was beatified by Pope John Paul II on 24 February 1979.

For an account of Ebner's visionary experiences, I recommend Bernard McGinn's The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism--1200-1350, the third volume of his monumental history of western Christian mysticism. Her Revelations is also available in a Classics of Western Spirituality edition, Margaret Ebner: Major Works.

Catherine of Genoa: Saint and Mystic

Catherine of Genoa (canonized 16 June 1737)

St. Catherine of Genoa,
eighteenth-century painting by
Giovanni Agostino Ratti

Caterina Fieschi was born in Genoa in 1447, the fifth and last child of Jacopo Fieschi and Francesca di Negro, both members of aristocratic and politically active families.

An account of Caterina's life, later recorded by her confessor, indicates that by the age of thirteen the young Caterina had professed a desire to enter the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, a house of Augustinian Canonesses of the Lateran, where her sister was a nun. Although she was ardent, the nuns thought she was too young, and to take her into the convent at such an age was against their customary practice.

Instead, after her father's death, her brother used her marriage as a way of settling some family disputes. Not yet sixteen, Caterina Fieschi was married in 1463--although she was recognized for her holiness, Caterina was also noted for her "dutiful obedience." 

Her marriage to Giuliano Adorno was unhappy in the extreme--she endured his abuse for ten years and then, on 22 March 1473, after she experienced a mystical, transformative vision of God, the already religiously inclined young woman underwent a "conversion."

What followed was a "life of purification," one devoted to prayer and penance. She averted her eyes from all "sights of the world," spoke as few words as possible, slept as little as possible, and ate as little as possible, only enough to sustain life. (According to the account of her life made by her confessor, she fasted completely during Advent and Lent, sustained only by water "flavored" with salt and vinegar.)

As part of her devotional practice, she wore a hair shirt, and when she did sleep, it was on a bed filled with briars and thistles. She made her husband promise to live with her as if he were her brother--a promise that he kept, chastened by his own financial ruin. She was instructed directly by the holy spirit in a series of visions, and, aside from the six hours a day she devoted to prayer, she dedicated her life to ministering to the poor and the sick. She eventually converted her husband, who died in 1497. Catherine herself died on 15 September 1510.

In addition to writing his account of her "miraculous life," her confessor, a "Father Marabotti," preserved the two works attributed to her, a treatise on purgatory, Purgation and Purgatory, and The Spiritual Dialogue.

Catherine of Genoa was beatified in 1675 by Pope Clement X and canonized by Pope Clement XII on 16 June 1737.

For his account of the "most important late medieval Italian woman mystic after Catherine of Siena," I recommend Bernard McGinn's The Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism, 1350-1550, volume 5 of his mammoth history of western Christian mysticism. McGinn is excellent on the "problem" of "Catherine's" writings--since she knew how to write "but she chose not to leave anything of her own to posterity."

The texts attributed to her represent her "teachings" in "texts put together by her followers and not published until 1551." The works are available in a number of editions, but I like the version that is published as part of the Classics of Western Civilization series, Catherine of Genoa: Purgation and Purgatory, The Spiritual Dialogue.

Mechthild of Magdeburg and the "Flowing Light of the Godhead"

Mechthild of Magdeburg (Asteroid 873 Mechthild discovered 21 May 1917)

Because we do not know exactly when the Beguine mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg was born or when she died, I have chosen today to post about her--on this day in 1917, the German astronomer Max Wolf discovered an asteroid now known as 873 Mechthild, named after this thirteenth-century woman.

A nineteenth-century representation
of Mechthild of Magdeburg,
Church of St. Gordian and Epimachus,
Merazhofen,

What we know about Mechthild's life comes from the work for which she is principally known, The Flowing Light of the Godhead. The biographical details are few--she seems to have been born between 1207 and 1210, the child of a noble family, since she refers to court life and customs.

She writes that she has a brother, Baldwin, who joins the Dominican order and who receives an excellent scholastic education, though Mechthild refers to herself as a "simple spiritual creature" (her work is notable in that, unlike most of the spiritual writing of her contemporaries, it seems to have been written in the vernacular rather than Latin).

Mechthild also tells us that she began her remarkable visionary life at the age of twelve--and that, for the next thirty-one years, "the loving greeting" from the Holy Spirit came to her "every day."

In her work she reveals that when she was a young woman (perhaps about 1230) and "through God's word," she went to Magdeburg to live a life of "renunciation of the world." There she joined a Beguine community and seems also to have grown into a position of leadership within this community.

As I have written in an earlier post, the Beguines were a lay religious movement--Beguines were not associated with any religious order, nor did they live in any officially sanctioned community. They lived an ascetic, spiritual life, devoting themselves to poverty and chastity, working among the poor and ill and modeling their lives on the life of Jesus. To be a Beguine was to live a potentially dangerous life--in a few days I will post on Marguerite Porete, a French Beguine who was burned at the stake for heresy in 1310.

Mechthild writes that she "painfully conquered the body for twenty years"--always tired, weak, and ill, she devoted herself to "sighing, weeping, confession, fasting, watching," following in her life the "glorious suffering" of Jesus. It is at this point, after twenty years of rigorous self-discipline, that her confessor tells Mechthild what God expects of her:

Then he [her confessor] commanded me to do that about which I often weep for shame when I look at my unworthiness: write this book out of God's heart and mouth. This book has thus come lovingly from God and not from the human senses.

For the next fifteen (or so) years, Mechthild records her visions, conversations with God, and revelations. At some point, probably about 1270, she puts aside her "homeless life" and joins the monastery at Helfta, joining the remarkable Gertrude of Hackeborn, her sister Mechthilde of Hackeborn, and a woman we have met before, Gertrude the Great.

Helfta, where Mechthilde of Magdeburg lived at
the end of her life

The reasons for Mechthild's move are not clear--but she was old, she had become blind, and, perhaps more critically, increasing restrictions were being placed on Beguines in Germany and the Low Countries, and Mechthild's own religious claims and her criticisms of the institutional church had made her vulnerable. The date of her death is not certain--there are a wide ranges of dates suggested, from 1282 to 1297.

One of the best accounts of Mechthild as a visionary is Bernard McGinn's, in vol. 3 of his history of western Christian mysticism, The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism, 1200-1350. There is a very affordable edition of The Flowing Light of the Godhead, but you can find a good, manageable chunk in Henry Carrigan's Meditations from Mechthild of Magdeburg.

Julian of Norwich: "All Shall Be Well"

Julian of Norwich (receives her "revelations," 13 May 1373)

We know very little about Julian of Norwich--her birth date, for example, or her death date, or her parents' names, or her family's social class and status. She may have been a Benedictine nun, but, then again, she may have been a laywoman. We aren't even sure about her name. But, while we don't know these sorts of biographical "facts"--the kinds of things we consider very important--we do know a great deal about what Julian regarded as the single most important event in her life. 

A twentieth-century sculpture of Julian of Norwich,
holding a copy of her Revelations,
Church of St. Julian at Norwich

About the date of that singular event, Julian is very specific: it occurred in "the year of our Lord 1373, the thirteenth day of May."* She tells us that she has been ill for eight days. She believes she is dying--in fact, she says she thinks she is "on the point of death," and those who are around her, including her mother, "also thought this." She can feel herself dying, indeed she feels that the lower half of her body is already dead. A cross is brought to her, her "sight begins to fail," and the room around her goes dark--except for a light on the cross. 

Then, she recounts, "I felt as if the upper part of my body were beginning to die." She loses strength, her arms fall limp, her head rolls to one side, and she experiences a terrible pain and shortness of breath. 

And then the extraordinary occurs: her pain is suddenly gone, and, although she is a simple and uneducated woman, she experiences a "revelation" of Jesus's love through series of "showings." Or, in Julian's words: "These Revelations were shewed to a simple creature unlettered."

Julian does tell us a bit more about herself in the two versions of the work that is now referred to as The Revelations of Divine Love or, alternatively, as The Showing of Divine Love or, more simply, as Shewings (using her spelling). Julian tells us that her transformative experience occurs when she is "thirty and a half years old," putting her birth around the end of 1342.

In the longer and later version of her text, Julian indicates that she has been receiving "instruction" about her remarkable visionary experience for some twenty years, suggesting that at least two decades separate the shorter and longer versions of her Revelations. But, although the intervening years have clearly led to a great deal of study, Julian refers to this new "instruction" as coming to her not via the theologians and philosophers whose work she has read in those years, but immediately, "through ghostly understanding." 

A brief introductory paragraph of the only surviving copy of the shorter version of the Revelations, written by an unidentified person, provides a name for the author, "Julian," explains that she is "a recluse at Norwich," and adds that she is "still alive, A.D. 1413." There are also few external references--four wills, dated between 1394 and 1416, make small bequests to her as a "recluse at Norwich." After 1416, there are no more bequests, suggesting that Julian has died.

The opening of Julian's shorter text,
from a single surviving manuscript copy
(Beginning, "There is Avision Schewed Be the goodeness of god to Adeo/
uoute Woman and hir Name es Julyan")

These details about her work--that the first version of her Revelations was recorded after 1373, the second twenty years later, about 1393--mean that hers is, quite likely, the earliest book in English by a woman writer.

Julian's Revelations reflect the turmoil--political, economic, religious--of her time. Julian's text reveals a thoughtful, profound theology as she deals with complicated doctrinal issues like the problems of predestination, the foreknowledge of God, and the existence of evil. And yet her texts express her insights and interpretations in simple--yet compelling--language and with immediate metaphors.

Most controversially, perhaps, are the passages in which Julian describes Jesus as a mother: God "is our father," but he is also "our loving mother." (This comparison is developed especially in Chapters 58 through 62 in the long text.) But there are many who are much more prepared to discuss Julian's theology than I am.

I have already written that, while I include a number of saints, martyrs, mystics, and visionaries in these posts, I am not at all a believer in any religion myself. Even so, that does not mean I am not profoundly moved by Julian of Norwich. For one thing, there is the incantatory power of the most famous passage in Julian's Revelations. Julian has questions and doubts. To which God replies,

I will make all things well, I shall make all things well, I may make all things well and I can make all things well; and you will see that yourself, that all things will be well.

And, then, there is this, from her discussion of the first of the "shewings" she receives. Julian's God is neither wrathful nor a deity who inflicts punishment. In response to her anxieties and distress, God shows her "spiritually" how much he loves humankind: "And in this he showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazel nut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed. And it was as round as any ball." She continues:

I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, 'What may this be?' And it was answered generally thus, 'It is all that is made.' I marveled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nothing for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it. And so have all things their beginning by the love of God.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am not at all an optimist--quite the opposite, in fact. My dearest friend sometimes calls me "Dr. No." I am not even a glass-half-empty kind of woman--I'm a "why in the hell are there only two glasses anyway?" kind of person. But I am deeply moved by these passages in Julian's Revelations. And during a particularly bad patch in my life, I found that it helped enormously to put a hazel nut in my pocket--just reaching in and feeling it made me think of Julian's quiet reassurances--"all things will be well."

Although the bad patch is long gone, there are still a few hazel nuts left in my pockets. Every once in a while, I put my hand in a jacket or a coat, and I find one. When I do, I feel immensely happy.

At some point during her life, though it is not clear when, Julian enclosed herself as an anchoress in a cell attached to the Church of St. Julian at Norwich. (She may have become "Julian" because of her association with this church, dedicated to the early Christian saint, St. Julian the "Hospitaller" [he built a hospital for travelers].) The church was destroyed during World War II, but it has been rebuilt, and now there is a reconstructed cell, a shrine, and, next door, a Julian of Norwich Centre.

A few days ago, I wrote about a student who had suddenly looked up from her desk one day in class, remembering that her mother had dragged her around Germany to visit places associated with Hildegard of Bingen. A similar situation emerged in a class I taught another semester--a guy who had slept through most of our classes suddenly came alive when we turned our attention to Julian of Norwich. He'd traveled in England when he was in the army and had somehow stumbled on the Church of St. Julian and Julian's story--he shared tons of memories and photos with us. And, as I recall, stayed awake during the rest of the semester. (Or maybe I'm just imagining that . . . )

The rebuilt cell of Julian, attached to the rebuilt
Church of St. Julian at Norwich

There are several good editions of Julian's Revelations. If you are interested in seeing both the short and long versions of Julian's text, and seeing it in her original Middle English, there is a two-volume edition by Edmund Colledge and James Walsh, A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich; they also published a very affordable modern English translation, Showings, which has a particularly good introduction if you are interested in all of the material Julian has read between the shorter and longer texts. I can also recommend the edition by Denise N. Baker, The Showings of Julian of Norwich; as a volume in the Norton Critical Edition series, it has excellent supplementary materials, including an introduction, contextual readings, and critical essays, as well as a thorough bibliography.

Although she is not a saint, Julian's feast date is celebrated in the Catholic Church on 13 May. (In the Anglican Church, it's 8 May.)

*In supplying this date, I am relying on the second of Julian's versions of events, often referred to as the "long text." Julian completes this version of the experience after two decades' of reflection. There is an alternative date in some copies, 8 May, but the more generally accepted date, for what it's worth, is 13 May. Even the most definite of dates is, it seems, just a bit uncertain . . . 

The Blessed Marie of Oignies

Marie of Oignies (1 May 1240)

First, a word about why Marie of Oignies is the topic of today's post. Most of what we know about this remarkable religious woman comes to us from a biography written by the theologian Jacques de Vitry--whose death occurred on 1 May 1240. And so today, on the anniversary of Jacques de Vitry's death, I'm writing about Marie of Oignies.

To write about Marie of Oignies on the anniversary of the death of Jacque de Vitry is fitting, I think, because despite her undoubted influence on many religious women who followed, we don't have any information about Marie's family, or about her life, or about her religious experiences, except the details and interpretations that come to us from him. And his biographical work, Vita Mariae Oignacensis, was not written for the many laywomen who found inspiration in her life or who would seek to follow her model. In fact, I've preserved its Latin title here because the work was directed to (and written for) educated religious men so that they could use the details of her life in their own teaching.  

A bust representing Marie of Oignies

According to Jacques de Vitry's account of her life, Marie was probably born in 1176 or 1177, the daughter of a wealthy family from Nivelles, Belgium. Although she rejected the luxuries of life that her parents provided her and desired a life of poverty, expressing her wish to become a nun, her parents arranged for her marriage when she was fourteen (if she was born in 1176/77, that would date her marriage to 1190/91).

But, at least according to Jacques de Vitry's version of Marie's life, the new bride managed to persuade her new husband to take vows of chastity and poverty with her, and the two moved to a leper hospital in Willambroux, where they devoted themselves to lives of service, used their own money to support the work of the hospital, and earned the criticism of their respective families.

By 1207, Marie de Oignies left her husband and Willambroux, with his approval and consent, for a cell at the Augustinian priory of St. Nicholas at Oignies. There, although not having taken the vows of a nun belonging to any religious order, she lived a life of prayer and poverty. Nevertheless, despite her withdrawal from the world, she earned a reputation in the world for her powers of healing and her extraordinary visionary experiences. 

Perhaps drawn by Marie's reputation, Jacques de Vitry became a canon at the priory in 1209. He was ordained in 1210, probably as a result of Marie's influence, and, more important, became her confessor. He remained with her until her death in 1213, and he composed his Life of Marie Oignies two years later. 

Jacques de Vitry's account of Marie of Oignies was part of a larger project, his Liber de mulieribus Leodiensibus, (Book of the Women of Liège), which Annette Esser describes as "a propaganda effort to gain official ecclesiastical recognition for . . . the Flemish Beguines."*

Marie's religious dedication, as described by Jacques de Vitry, is witnessed by two key elements: her extreme asceticism (her early death is almost certainly due to her extended periods of self-starvation) and her extraordinary visionary experiences.

In her discussion of Marie of Oignies, Esser notes four key visions: "the vision of fiery excess," which occurs right after Marie's marriage; her vision of the life of Christ, which is accompanied by what Jacques de Vitry describes as a "flood of tears"; her "ecstatic vision" of "self-stigmatization," a vision that results in her using a knife to cut out a chunk of her own flesh; and her "vision of hands from purgatory," the result of fasting and endless work, in which she sees and experiences the suffering of souls in Purgatory.

Marie's life--and, in particular, her visionary experiences and her extremes of self-deprivation--would offer inspiration to and become a model for many women who did not have the social status, wealth, or education that would allow them to take up a religious life in a convent.

The interior courtyard of the abbey of St. Nicholas, Oignies,
where relics of Marie of Oignies are preserved

Marie of Oignies died in 1213 and was beatified by the Catholic Church, her feast day celebrated on 23 June. Some sources list 23 June as the day of her death, but I can find no documentation for that information.

There are several affordable paperback editions of the Life of Marie de Oignies. For an introduction to a range of medieval women mystics, I recommend Elizabeth Petroff's Medieval Women's Visionary Literature and her Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism. Annette Esser's essay on Marie of Oignies is in Women Christian Mystics Speak to Our Time, ed. David Brian Perrin.

In her extreme fasting, Marie of Oignies precedes Catherine of Siena, whom we discussed two days ago, by more than a century. Two works I suggested there, Rudolph Bell's 1985 Holy Anorexia and Caroline Walker Bynum's 1988 classic, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women, are equally relevant here.

*Although there is a great deal of uncertainty about the origins of the word beguine, this lay religious movement was important through the sixteenth century, especially, though not exclusively, in northern Europe. Beguines were not members of an established religious order (like the Benedictines or Franciscans, for example), but, following the model of a woman like Marie of Oignies, they lived individual or communal lives in imitation of Christ's, lives of poverty, chastity, self-denial, and service to the poor and the ill. (It is sometimes said the Marie of Oignies is the first beguine. In her 1986 women's history classic, A Small Sound of the Trumpet: Women in Medieval Life, Margaret Wade Labarge calls Marie of Oignies "the mother of the beguine movement." )

Saint Margaret of Cortona, "A Second Magdalene"

Margaret of Cortona (died 22 February 1297)

                           Saint Margaret of Cortona,

               detail from a late thirteenth-century painting,

                      Museo Diocesano, Cortona, Italy

A wild and spoiled child, a willful and "dissolute" young woman, Margaret of Cortona left home at the age of seventeen in order to live as the mistress of a wealthy young man.

She became pregnant and gave birth to a son, but her lover, the child's father, was murdered. A distraught Margaret tried to return home, only to find that her father would not receive her.

She then devoted her life to prayer and penance, finding a home among the Franciscans. Her son eventually became a friar, Margaret joining the Third Order of Saint Francis, a lay penitential order devoted to a life of poverty, prayer, and penance.

In 1277 Margaret of Cortona experienced the first of a series of visions of Jesus, who addressed her first as la poverella, ultimately as "my child." Among her many works on behalf of the poor and unfortunate, she helped to establish a hospital for the impoverished and sick in Cortona and gathered together a group of dedicated nurses to work in the hospital.

Margaret of Cortona was canonized in 1728.

The Franciscan Institute has published a biographical/devotional book, The Life and Miracles of Saint Margaret of Cortona (1247-1297)--while not a scholarly work, it may still be of interest for its treatment of Margaret of Cortona's life. This is the best of quite a number of devotional appreciations of the saint. You may also be interested in Saint Margaret of Cortona, a novel by the great French writer and Nobel Prize winner (in Literature, 1952) François Mauriac.

The Basilica of St. Margaret's, Cortona