(PDF) "The Creation of A Franciscan Lay Saint: Margaret of Cortona and Her Legenda"

This study uncovers the liturgical and pastoral ministries performed by Benedictine women religious in England from 900 to 1200. Three ministries are examined in detail – the proclamation of the gospel, the practice of penance, and the administration of the Eucharist – but they are prefaced by portraits of the very monastic officers that most often performed them – cantors, sacristans, prioresses, and abbesses. The research presented in this study challenges past scholarly accounts of these ministries that either locate them exclusively in the so-called “golden age” of double monasteries headed by abbesses in the seventh and eighth centuries, or read the monastic and ecclesiastical reforms of the tenth through twelfth centuries as effectively relegating women religious to complete dependency on the sacramental care of ordained men. This study shows that far from becoming wholly dependent on such care, many women religious in central medieval England continued to exercise prominent liturgical and pastoral roles in their communities, much like those assumed by their earlier Anglo-Saxon foremothers and by their contemporary Benedictine brothers. To uncover these liturgical and pastoral ministries, this study investigates a variety of textual sources and material evidence – monastic rules, customaries, penitentials, ecclesiastical decrees, canon law collections, theological treatises, chronicles, saints’ lives, miracle collections, letters, charters, cartularies, wills, mortuary rolls, manuscript illuminations, seals, sculptures, and grave goods. But most innovative and central to this study are the close paleographical and codicological analyses of the surviving liturgical manuscripts that were produced by and for houses of Benedictine women religious in central medieval England. When identified and then studied as a whole – which they have not been until this point – these books provide a treasure-trove of unexamined evidence for understanding the lives of women religious. The manuscripts analyzed include psalters, prayerbooks, gospel books, lectionaries, homiliaries, calendars, pontificals, and ordinals. These books serve as the foundational documents of practice for this study, for they offer witnesses not only to the liturgical and pastoral ministries that women religious performed, but also to the productions of female scribes as copyists, correctors, and even creators of liturgical texts.

Sherri Franks Johnson explores the roles of religious women in the changing ecclesiastical and civic structure of late medieval Bologna, demonstrating how convents negotiated a place in their urban context and in the church at large. During this period Bologna was the most important city in the Papal States after Rome. Using archival records from nunneries in the city, Johnson argues that communities of religious women varied in the extent to which they sought official recognition from the male authorities of religious orders. While some nunneries felt that it was important to their religious life to gain recognition from monks and friars, others were content to remain local and autonomous. In a period often described as an era of decline and the marginalization of religious women, Johnson shows instead that they saw themselves as active participants in their religious orders, in the wider church and in their local communities.

This essay begins with the paradox that Catherine of Siena, perhaps the most famous uncloistered religious woman in the Middle Ages, became after her death an authority and model for cloistered monasticism for women during the Dominican reform movement. But the dissonance in the idea of Catherine as a model for cloistered religious women is heightened by false assumptions or oversimplifications of Catherine’s religious status, and of what it meant for Catherine to be a model for this or that form of religious life. This essay surveys Catherine’s letters to religious women, including letters to penitents or mantellate and letters to abbesses and nuns in monasteries. While Catherine’s letters to penitents and other women living in the world focus on the challenges of living without a formal religious rule, her letters to nuns focus on the importance of their maintaining claustration, following their rule, and on the dangers of wealth—a recognition of the generally higher social and economic standing of monastic women. Catherine seems also to identify certain kinds of prayer with monastic life. It is important to remember that Catherine herself founded a monastery, and while it remains unclear what precisely her intentions were for this community, it is another sign of Catherine’s interest in and commitment to cloistered religiosity. The essay concludes by arguing for a more nuanced understanding of what it might have meant for Catherine to be a model for specific forms of religious life.

THE CREATION OF A FRANCISCAN LAY SAINT: MARGARET OF CORTONA AND HER LEGENDA* * I am grateful for the immensely valuable comments I received from Caroline Walker Bynum, Paula Findlen, Emily Graham, Hillary Miller, Maureen Miller, Jeffrey Miner, Ellen Wurtzel, and the members of Stanford’s Theoretical Perspectives on the Middle Ages working group. 1 For a history of the Franciscans in Cortona, see Giuseppina Inga, ‘Gli insediamenti mendicanti a Cortona’, Storia della città: rivista internazionale di storia urbana e territoriale, ix (1978), 44–55; and Fortunato Iozzelli, ‘I francescani ad Arezzo e a Cortona nel duecento’, in La prescenza francescana nella Toscana del ‘200: Sabati francescani, ciclo di conferenze 1989–1990 (Quaderni di vita e cultura francescana, i, Florence, 1990), 121–42. For work on the lay penitential movement see Gilles Gérard Meersseman (ed.), Dossier de l’ordre de la pénitence au XIII e siècle (Spicilegium Friburgense, vii, Fribourg, 1961); Giovanna Casagrande, Religiosità penitenziale e città al tempo dei comuni (Bibliotheca Seraphico-Capuccina, xlviii, Rome, 1995); and the essays collected in Mariano D’Alatri (ed.), Il movimento francescano della penitenza nella società medioevale, Atti del 38 Convegno di Studi Francescani, Padua, 1979 (Rome, 1980). 2 While there has been some uncertainty whether Margaret became a Franciscan penitent in 1277 or 1275, Iozzelli has convincingly argued that 1277 is most likely to be the correct date; see Iunctae Bevegnatis, Legenda de vita et miraculis beatae Margaritae de Cortona, ed. Fortunato Iozzelli (Bibliotheca Franciscana Ascetica Medii Aevi, xiii, Rome, 1997), (hereafter cited as Legenda), 60, n. 32. Past and Present, no. 228 (August 2015) doi:10.1093/pastj/gtv023 ß The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2015 Downloaded from http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on August 13, 2015 Margaret of Cortona’s arrival in the city that would, within a generation of her death in 1297, celebrate her as its patron saint must have been the talk of the town. Margaret was an unmarried laywoman who, after living for years as the concubine of a Montepulciano nobleman, came to Cortona with her illegitimate son around 1272 seeking protection and forgiveness after the death of her lover left her homeless. Within a few years of her arrival in the city, Margaret had asked the Cortonese Franciscans to allow her to wear their penitential habit, a decision that would not only mark her new dedication to a penitential life but also offer her an association with a religious order on the rise in the city.1 Although the friars were at first sceptical — Margaret’s beauty and youth led them to question her commitment — in 1277 they eventually relented and allowed her to wear a habit that would mark her as a Franciscan lay penitent.2 During the years she spent in Cortona, Margaret dedicated herself to a rigorous and increasingly dramatic religious 58 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 228 3 Legenda. Thomas Renna shared with me an early draft of his translation of the Legenda: Fra Giunta Bevegnati, The Life and Miracles of Saint Margaret of Cortona (1247–1297), ed. Shannon Larson, trans. Thomas Renna (St. Bonaventure, NY, 2012). While I benefited greatly from his work, the translations in this paper are my own. 4 Herbert Grundmann, Religious Movements in the Middle Ages: The Historical Links between Heresy, the Mendicant Orders, and the Women’s Religious Movement in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Century, with the Historical Foundations of German Mysticism, trans. Steven Rowan (Notre Dame, Ind.,1995), originally published as Religiöse Bewegungen im Mittelalter (Berlin, 1935). Downloaded from http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on August 13, 2015 programme that she hoped would make up for her sinful past and bring her closer to Christ. The Franciscans’ early misgivings about her past shame and present transformation remained, however. They eventually denounced her at a provincial meeting as delusional and a fraud, after which she began to distance herself from the order she had once been so eager to join. She moved from the cell attached to the church of San Francesco in the centre of Cortona, where she had been living, to the abandoned church of San Basilio, nestled at the top of a steep hill half a mile above the city. At some point during her time at San Basilio, the Franciscans sent Giunta Bevegnati, Margaret’s confessor and the author of the Legenda de vita et miraculis Beatae Margaritae de Cortona, to their Siena house, where he would spend seven years.3 While Giunta was in Siena, Ser Badia, a secular cleric, took over as Margaret’s primary confessor. In addition to Margaret and Ser Badia, a community of lay penitents gathered at San Basilio to help her rebuild the church and eventually to manage the many devotees who would flock to her tomb. Margaret’s desire to form an association with the Franciscan order is evidence of a broader tendency among the late medieval laity to construct their religious lives in conjunction with the burgeoning mendicant orders. A connection to the Franciscans offered a lay penitent such as Margaret both prestige and legitimation. But the history of such relationships between lay penitents and their mendicant guardians remains unwritten. While Herbert Grundmann’s study of late medieval religious movements first alerted modern scholars to the complexity as well as the acrimony in the associations between the mendicants and their female counterparts, that pioneering work did not investigate the relationships forged between friars and the men and women who retained their lay status.4 As a result, THE CREATION OF A FRANCISCAN LAY SAINT 59 5 See, for example, André Vauchez, The Laity in the Middle Ages: Religious Beliefs and Devotional Practices, ed. Daniel E. Bornstein, trans. Margery J. Schneider (Notre Dame, Ind., 1993); Lester K. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, 1978); and Augustine Thompson, Cities of God: The Religion of the Italian Communes, 1125–1325 (University Park, Pa., 2005), 4. Although Thompson aims to highlight lay religion and writes that he has ‘chosen to keep the Franciscans on the sidelines and so let the piety that produced Francis speak for itself’, his valuable work still assumes a harmony between Franciscan and lay interests. 6 (Pseudo)-Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, Determinationes quaestionum circa regulam fratrum minorum, in Bonaventurae Opera Omnia, VIII (Quaracchi, 1923), 327–74. 7 M.-D. Chenu, Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century: Essays on New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West, ed. and trans. Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little ( Toronto, 1997) (originally published as La Théologie au douzième siècle (Paris, 1957)), 219. 8 Chenu, Nature, Man and Society, 214. Downloaded from http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on August 13, 2015 scholars after Grundmann have explored the explosion of lay religious enthusiasm in late medieval cities in a manner that largely assumes the friars supported and fostered such a movement.5 The dramatic unravelling of Margaret of Cortona’s relationship with her Franciscan guardians argues otherwise. The following study of Margaret’s early cult challenges scholars’ assumption that the mendicants were eager mediators of the surge of late medieval, urban, lay religious life. By first pointing out the tensions and conflicts that so dominated Margaret’s experience as a Franciscan penitent — issues that since the time of Margaret’s canonization in the eighteenth century scholars have either misread, de-emphasized, or missed altogether — and then looking at broader concerns about friars associating with lay penitents voiced in the mid thirteenthcentury Franciscan text Determinations of Questions Concerning the Rule, this study will argue that the mendicants sometimes hampered rather than fostered lay religion.6 In his study of the changing definition of the vita apostolica, M.-D. Chenu noted that the ‘new role of the laity [in the later Middle Ages] was a logical and necessary outcome of the revolution in progress’.7 That revolution increasingly saw the path towards an ideal Christian life not within the monastery but instead in the secular world. By the end of the twelfth century, European Christians were looking to itinerant preachers instead of monks as most exemplifying the life described in the gospels.8 This article’s exploration of 60 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 228 9 Neslihan Şenocak, The Poor and The Perfect: The Rise of Learning in the Franciscan Order, 1209–1310 (Ithaca, 2012), 79. 10 Legenda, I, 1. 11 See Giovanna Casagrande, ‘Un ordine per i laici: penitenza e penitenti nel duecento’, in Maria Pia Alberzoni et al. (eds.), Francesco d’Assisi e il primo secolo di storia francescana ( Torino, 1997), 237–55; Héribert Roggen, ‘Les Relations du premier ordre franciscain avec le tiers-ordre au XIII e siècle’, in O. Schmucki (ed.), L’Ordine della penitenza di San Francesco d’Assisi nel secolo XIII, Atti del 18 Convegno di Studi Francescani, Assisi, 1972 (Rome, 1973), 199–209; and R. Pazzelli, and L. Temperini (eds.), La ‘Supra montem’ di Niccolo IV (1289): genesi e difusione di una regola, (Rome, 1988). 12 The bull outlined a set of rules and regulations for the lay penitential life that were drawn largely from the 1221 Memoriale propositi believed by scholars to have been the work of Cardinal Ugolino dei Conti Segni (Gregory IX). See Pazzelli and Temperini (eds.), La ‘Supra montem’ di Niccolo IV. Downloaded from http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on August 13, 2015 Margaret’s difficulties with her Franciscan guardians, as well as the contention in the Determinations that such difficulties were an inevitable outcome of Franciscans’ association with lay penitents, brings into focus a key tension and irony born from that lay revolution: at the same time as a vita apostolica was increasingly understood to be found in the lay world, the church was articulating its authority by distinguishing and separating the religious from the secular. No example encapsulates this irony more clearly than the early history of the Franciscan order. While Francis of Assisi’s uncanny embrace of the apostolic life made him an exemplar of a new understanding of the vita apostolica, the church’s requirement that he and his Friars Minor become clerics complicated the form and function of the new religious life they represented: if friars were priests, what had become of that lay revolution?9 In the Legenda’s first chapter, Giunta describes Margaret as having asked the Cortonese friars in 1277 to allow her to join ‘the third order of blessed Francis’.10 Although throughout the thirteenth century several Franciscans refer to a ‘Third Order’, the order’s lay wing did not take institutional shape until 1289.11 That was the year when Pope Nicholas IV’s bull, Supra montem, called for all lay penitents to be placed under Franciscan guardianship and outlined a set of guidelines (or a rule) for those penitents to follow.12 Giunta’s use of an anachronistic term to describe Margaret’s 1277 association with the friars seems likely to have been aimed at bolstering the argument he makes throughout the text that she was a worthy candidate for his order to embrace: its ‘third light’. THE CREATION OF A FRANCISCAN LAY SAINT 61 Downloaded from http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on August 13, 2015 But we can also see in Giunta’s designation an attempt to neutralize an inherently contentious relationship by placing it within an institutional and hierarchical structure. While this article will make clear that the Franciscans’ suspicion and ultimate rejection of Margaret was a result of the perfect anxiety-inducing storm created by her gender as well as her past and present behaviour — she was, after all, both an unattached woman with a scandalous sexual past and a visionary claiming direct access to Christ — it will also argue that it is within this one particularly difficult relationship as well as within the more general concerns voiced by the author of the Determinations that we can see how at odds understandings of the vita apostolica were with an expanding institutional church in the later Middle Ages. To be a lay penitent was to demonstrate that a rigorous religious life could be crafted independently of the church. When penitents such as Margaret turn in the thirteenth century to the mendicants, the most popular new representatives of the church’s hierarchy and authority, for support and guidance, the limits of the friars’ pastoral identities come into clear focus. After exploring how an eighteenth-century editor’s timeline has encouraged scholars to sidestep both the full complexity of the Legenda and the relationships it chronicles, this article will turn to look at how a close reading of the Legenda argues both for a new date of composition and for how pervasive the Franciscans’ doubts were towards Margaret, even after her death. It will then turn to consider how the mid thirteenth-century Franciscan text, the Determinations, suggests that such misgivings about lay penitents were widespread within the order. Finally, it will return to the Legenda in order to consider how passages probably produced by Margaret’s confessor at San Basilio, the secular cleric Ser Badia, unambiguously celebrate Margaret’s spiritual gifts and may have inspired Giunta to revise the Legenda in the hope of convincing the many friars who had maintained their doubts and suspicions that she was not only worthy of veneration but was also the order’s ‘third light’. This essay will end by looking at how in the late fourteenth century, the order itself embarked upon a larger project of historical revisionism when it first produced lists of so-called ‘Third Order’ saints. 62 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 228 I READING AND DATING THE LEGENDA 13 Legenda, ‘Prologus’. Ibid. 15 Mariano Nuti considered whether the Legenda was first put together as a chronological account of Margaret’s life in Cortona but later reorganized according to her virtues; see Mariano Nuti, Margherita da Cortona: la sua legenda e la storia (Rome, 1924), 74–80. In the text, Giunta often notes that Margaret experienced a vision on a particular feast day, but he does not provide enough information to connect that day to a specific year. Joanna Cannon and André Vauchez have suggested that the Legenda’s chaotic and non-linear style suggests it is a series of working notes rather than a polished piece of hagiography; see Joanna Cannon and André Vauchez, Margherita of Cortona and the Lorenzetti: Sienese Art and the Cult of a Holy Woman in Medieval Tuscany (University Park, Pa., 1999), 156. 16Archivio del Convento di S. Margherita, Cortona, Codex 61. Also found in Legenda, ‘Appendix’. Only three medieval manuscripts of the Legenda survive. All were written in the fourteenth century and all remain in Cortona. On the manuscript history of the Legenda, see Fortunato Iozzelli, ‘Introduzione’, in Legenda, 149–69. Giunta also notes in the ‘Testimony’ that the papal legate, Napoleone Orsini, had held a copy of the Legenda in Rome for several months, and that on 15 February 1308, in the Cortona palazzo of Lord Uguccio dei Casali, Orsini gave the text his approval. 17 By the mid thirteenth century, responsibility for checking lay penitents for signs of heresy had shifted from bishops to the friars; see Iozzelli, ‘Introduzione’, in Legenda, 9, and 66–9; Mariano D’Alatri, ‘Genesi della regola di Niccoló IV: aspetti storici’, in Pazzelli and Temperini (eds.), La ‘Supra montem’ di Niccolo IV, 93–107. 14 Downloaded from http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on August 13, 2015 Our knowledge of Margaret’s life comes almost exclusively from Giunta Bevegnati’s Legenda, which was completed in 1308. Giunta divides the text into ten chapters, each of which focuses on a particular virtue that Margaret perfected. In his prologue, he writes that he had been preoccupied and did not have the time to arrange the text properly.13 He asks his reader to reorder material if anything ‘seems out of place’.14 His admission is not simply an expression of humility but an accurate description. While the first two chapters appear to give a chronological account of Margaret’s first years as a Franciscan penitent, the events related in the rest of the chapters follow no clear sequence.15 In a ‘Testimony of Authenticity’, written by Giunta and appended to a list of the Legenda’s contents in the earliest of the three surviving medieval manuscripts, we learn that Friar Giovanni da Castiglione, the ‘Inquisitor of the depraved heretics’ for provincial Tuscany, had asked Giunta to compile the text.16 While Giunta’s identification of Giovanni’s title does not indicate that Margaret was ever formally considered a heretic, the suspicion and concern it embodied would also be written into the Legenda.17 THE CREATION OF A FRANCISCAN LAY SAINT 63 18 I am referring here to Iozzelli’s edition of the Legenda. Archivio di Stato, ‘Statuti comunità soggette’, 279 ff., 95, 123, 140v– 141 ; these statutes, which mention Margaret’s feast day, have been transcribed by Vauchez in Cannon and Vauchez, Margherita of Cortona and the Lorenzetti, 227–30. 20 Margaret was canonized in 1728. See Vatican, Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Riti, Proc. 552. 21 Cannon and Vauchez, Margherita of Cortona and the Lorenzetti, 45–7. 22 The vita-panel can now be found in Cortona’s Museo Diocesano and the funerary monument remains in the church of Santa Margherita in Cortona. Watercolour copies of the lost frescoes were made during a 1653 papal visitation to Cortona that culminated in Margaret’s 1728 canonization. One set of these watercolours was inserted into Margaret’s canonization proceedings; see Vatican, Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Riti, Proc. 552. For Joanna Cannon’s study of these watercolour copies and other visual sources produced in conjunction with Margaret’s cult at San Basilio as well as her attribution to the Lorenzetti brothers, see Cannon and Vauchez, Margherita of Cortona and the Lorenzetti. 19 Florence, v Downloaded from http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on August 13, 2015 But such suspicion is not what a reader first notices about the Legenda. Throughout the text, Giunta makes clear that Margaret’s identity as an ideal penitent and model member of the laity stemmed in no small part from her connection to the Franciscans: the friars’ guidance and example allowed her to become, as Christ calls her, ‘the third light’ given to the Franciscan order, following Saints Francis and Clare. While the text’s length (nearly three hundred pages in a recent edition)18 and Giunta’s efforts to have its contents approved by Rome suggest that the Franciscans dedicated significant time and resources to celebrating Margaret, in the generation after her death, it was the civic government of Cortona — the commune — and not the Franciscans, which most vigorously advocated for her sanctity. In 1325, Cortona identified Margaret as a saint in its first set of civic statutes and made provisions for the city to pay for the rector of San Basilio (where Margaret’s body lay) to travel to Avignon in the hope of attaining her canonization by the church.19 Although she would not be canonized until the early eighteenth century, in the fourteenth century San Basilio became a popular pilgrimage site as news of the miracles taking place at her tomb and elsewhere spread.20 By the late 1330s, this onceruined church had been extensively rebuilt and was referred to as Santa Margherita.21 A painted vita-panel, a marble funerary monument, and the Sienese painters Ambrogio and Pietro Lorenzetti’s (now destroyed) fresco cycle surrounded Margaret’s tomb, all testaments to her thriving cult.22 The growth of that cult was boosted by indulgences that both the bishops of Arezzo and Chiusi, and the papal legates Niccolò da 64 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 228 23 Florence, Archivio di Stato, ‘Unione di vari luoghi pii di Cortona’. For more on these indulgences, see Mary Harvey Doyno, ‘Lilies Among Thorns: Lay Saints and their Cults in Northern and Central Italian Cities, 1150–1350’, (Columbia Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 2010), 331–40. Some, but not all, of these indulgences have been transcribed by Lodovico Bargigli da Pelago in Antica leggenda della vita e de’miracoli di S. Margherita di Cortona scritta dal di lei confessore fr. Giunta Bevegnati dell’Ordine de’Minori, 2 vols. (Lucca, 1793), Legenda, Note, Dissertazioni, and Registro. 24 Bargigli da Pelago, Antica leggenda, and Bargigli da Pelago, Sommario della storia della chiesa e convento di Santa Margherita da Cortona, compilato e disposto per ordine cronologico dal P. Fra Lodovico Bargigli da Pelago, 1781, unpublished manuscript, Cortona, Archivio conventuale di Santa Margherita. Bargigli da Pelago’s work on Margaret has been studied by Iozzelli, ‘La tradizione manoscritta e le edizioni della Legenda’, in Legenda, 162–5; and ‘I miracoli nella ‘‘Legenda’’’, in Legenda, 217–19; as well as by Cannon and Vauchez, Margherita of Cortona and the Lorenzetti, 15 and 42–51. Although Fortunato Iozzelli’s 1997 critical edition of the Legenda has become the preferred edition, scholars continue to rely on the basic timeline and conclusions Bargigli da Pelago pieced together in these two works. 25 Bargigli da Pelago, Antica leggenda, Dissertazioni, 52–63. 26 For example, see Cannon and Vauchez, Margherita of Cortona and the Lorenzetti, 21; Renna, ‘Introduction,’ in Bevegnati, The Life and Miracles of Saint Margaret of Cortona, ed. Larson, 17; Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, 2003), 100; David Burr, The Spiritual Franciscans: From Protest to Persecution in the Century after Saint Francis (University Park, Pa., 2001), 325. Downloaded from http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on August 13, 2015 Prato and Napoleone Orsini, offered to those who visited the rebuilt church — indulgences that curiously make no mention of Margaret’s Franciscan guardians.23 In the initial excitement surrounding her death, the Franciscans are conspicuously absent. If we turn to consider a timeline constructed by the eighteenthcentury scholar and priest Lodovico Bargigli da Pelago, we can see the genesis of modern scholars’ approach to Margaret’s early cult. Prompted by Margaret’s 1728 canonization, Bargigli da Pelago produced a history of Margaret’s San Basilio sanctuary and its growth into a major pilgrimage site as well as a copiously annotated edition of the Legenda.24 In his notes, Bargigli da Pelago proposed that the Franciscans condemned Margaret in 1288, appointed Giunta to be her primary confessor in 1289 upon Giovanni da Castiglione’s death, and finally moved the friar to the order’s Siena house in 1290. Bargigli da Pelago also argued that Giunta returned to Cortona shortly before Margaret’s death on 22 February 1297.25 This sequence of dates has encouraged scholars to assume that Giunta wrote the Legenda, with the full support of his order, in the decade after Margaret’s death.26 Moreover, it has also led scholars to see Giunta’s emphasis on Margaret’s institutional and spiritual connection to the Franciscans as evidence that, by the time Margaret died, the THE CREATION OF A FRANCISCAN LAY SAINT 65 27 Daniel Bornstein, ‘The Uses of the Body: The Church and the Cult of Santa Margherita da Cortona’, Church History, lxii (1993), 169–70; Anna Benvenuti Papi, ‘In castro poenitentiae’: santità e società femminile nell’Italia medievale (Italia Sacra, xlv, Rome, 1990), 141–68; and André Vauchez, ‘Medieval Penitents’, in Vauchez, The Laity in the Middle Ages, 126. 28 For example, the Legenda is the only source I have found to mention the provincial council meeting of the Tuscan Franciscans and it does not provide a date. In addition, while the Legenda does indicate that Giovanni da Castiglione died while Margaret was still alive, we have no sources to tell us when this occurred. Bargigli da Pelago’s decision that Giovanni died in 1289 provides an example of how his unsupported conclusions have become part of the scholarly consensus. In his study of Franciscan inquisitors, D’Alatri claims that Giovanni most probably died in 1289 and cites Bargigli da Pelago; see Mariano D’Alatri, L’Inquisizione francescana nell’Italia Centrale del Duecento: con il testo del ‘Liber inquisitionis’ di Orvieto (Bibliotheca Seraphico-Capuccina, xlix, Rome, 1996), 350. Subsequently, scholars have cited D’Alatri to support 1289 as the year Giovanni died; for example, see Iozzelli, ‘Introduzione’, in Legenda, 66. Finally, Bargigli da Pelago’s claim that Giovanni’s death precipitated a change in Giunta’s relationship with Margaret is also not supported in the text. Christ repeatedly tells Margaret to relay various bits of information to ‘Friar Giovanni and your confessor’, making clear that while Giovanni was still alive, Giunta already had a close connection to Margaret and, for some time, both men interacted with her. Iozzelli has noted that Bargigli da Pelago tried to impose more order on Giunta’s text than was actually there; see Iozzelli, ‘Introduzione’, in Legenda, 60, n. 32. 29 Legenda, I, 1. Downloaded from http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on August 13, 2015 Friars Minor were anxious to establish a clear affiliation with her cult as the news of her miracles spread and the many pilgrims coming to see her in a church they did not control grew (Santa Margherita would not be under Franciscan control until 1392).27 However, neither the Legenda nor any outside source supports such conclusions or Bargigli da Pelago’s chronology.28 Both the terms Giunta uses to describe penitents and his mention of a datable episode suggest that he began to record, or more accurately to monitor, Margaret’s behaviour at least twenty years before she died, and in all likelihood immediately after she became a Franciscan penitent. Giunta begins the Legenda by describing how in 1277 Margaret had ‘humbly offered herself on bended knees, with her hands joined and in tears to Friar Ranaldo, custodian of Arezzo, for admission to the third order of the blessed father Francis’.29 Elsewhere in the Legenda, Giunta describes other Cortonese penitents as ‘Brothers of Penance’, and members of ‘the Order of Penitents’, terms that not only convey the fluid institutional status penitents had in the thirteenth century but also serve as evidence that Giunta was writing before the formal creation of the Franciscan Third 66 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 228 30 D’Alatri noted the variety of terms Giunta uses to refer to penitents; see Mariano D’Alatri, ‘L’Ordine della penitenza nella leggenda di Margherita da Cortona’, in R. Pazzelli and L. Temperini (eds.) Prime manifestazioni di vita comunitaria maschile e femminile nel movimento francescano della penitenza (1215–1447), Atti del 48 Convegno di Studi Francescani, Assisi 1981 (Rome, 1982), 69, n. 5. 31 Legenda, VIII, II. 32 Scholars who have noted this include, Caciola, Discerning Spirits, 99–112; and Cannon and Vauchez, Margherita of Cortona and the Lorenzetti, 25. Downloaded from http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on August 13, 2015 Order in 1289.30 More evidence suggesting that he began his writing much earlier than scholars have suspected appears in the text’s eighth chapter. Here Giunta notes that he had begged Margaret to pray for peace in an impending battle between Bolognese and French forces, a battle that Pope Nicholas III, whose papacy lasted from 1277 to 1280, was eventually able to quell.31 A close reading of the text also suggests that it is not the work of a single author, as many scholars have assumed, but rather contains the voices (and perhaps the writing) of at least two of Margaret’s confessors — Giunta and Ser Badia. Episodes that were probably witnessed (and perhaps written) by Ser Badia describe Margaret’s life at San Basilio and away from her Franciscan guardians. In these passages, Margaret is no longer the dramatic and troubling lay penitent whose actions must be monitored and assessed but is rather a visionary whose spiritual experiences reveal and heal the sins of her contemporary urban world. Thus, while the Legenda began in an effort to check Margaret’s religious life, at some point, and perhaps motivated by Ser Badia’s response to Margaret, Giunta, without the support of his order, changed the text’s motivation: instead of monitoring Margaret, Giunta now wrote (and revised what he had already written) with the hopes that he might convince other Franciscans that she was not only worthy of veneration but was also the order’s ‘third light’, after Francis and Clare. Giunta devotes much of the Legenda to arguing that Margaret’s transformation from concubine to saint was entirely dependent upon her connection with the Franciscan Order.32 In those same passages where we see him making such an argument, we can also see evidence for how contentious and anxiety-ridden that relationship was from its inception. Nancy Caciola’s brief study of Margaret in her work on divine and demonic possession in the later Middle Ages stands out for being the first and (to my knowledge) only reading that confronts such a complexity in THE CREATION OF A FRANCISCAN LAY SAINT 67 II DOUBTING MARGARET While we can imagine that as an unattached mother with a scandalous past, Margaret would have both wanted and needed the prestige and the legitimacy the friars offered, Giunta uses Margaret’s desperation to frame many of his descriptions of her early years in Cortona and in the process conveys his order’s misgivings about her penitential transformation.36 He writes that when Margaret first became involved with the Franciscans, Christ had told her to remember the sorrow and despair she felt after the death of her lover had left her homeless and her father 33 Caciola, Discerning Spirits, 99–113. For example, Caciola suspects that the complex role Giovanni da Castiglione played in Margaret’s life influenced the beginnings of the Legenda. Moreover, she identifies what she calls ‘seams’ in the Legenda’s narrative that reveal a variety of responses to Margaret, including negative ones. 35 For example, Caciola writes that Giunta composed the vita ‘within a decade of Margaret’s passing’; see Discerning Spirits, 100. In a footnote on that same page, Caciola notes that ‘the chronology is difficult to clarify’, and cites Cannon and Vauchez, Margherita of Cortona and the Lorenzetti, who in turn cite Bargigli da Pelago. 36 Moreover, since Margaret lacked the wealth and social standing necessary to join a monastic community, a semi-religious life was probably the only religious opportunity available to her; see Benvenuti Papi, ‘In castro poenitentiae’, 145. 34 Downloaded from http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on August 13, 2015 this text.33 In constructing her argument that the Legenda is ‘a tale of two processes of reconstruction’ in which ‘Margaret remade herself from paramour to penitent’, and Giunta ‘transformed her from penitent to saintly paragon’, Caciola identifies aspects of the text’s workings that other scholars have overlooked.34 But while Caciola’s ideas have elucidated how the Franciscans’ doubts and suspicions about Margaret’s transformation appear in passages that, at first glance, seem to celebrate her as a saint, her overall understanding of the text and Margaret’s relationship with the Franciscans remains tethered to, and thus limited by, Bargigli da Pelago’s faulty timeline.35 If we clear away the assumptions and conclusions this timeline has produced, we can see that the Franciscans’ misgivings about Margaret began earlier, remained after reports of the miracles taking place at her tomb were circulating, and exemplify a broader perception within the order that associations with lay penitents, and most especially female lay penitents, were dangerous endeavours. 68 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 228 37 38 39 40 Legenda, I, 1(a). Ibid. Legenda, I, 1(b). Legenda, I, 1(c). Downloaded from http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on August 13, 2015 and stepmother had refused to help her and her son.37 Giunta adds that Christ had also reminded her that it was through her ‘filial fear’ of the Franciscans that her heart was healed. In the rigorous routine of penance she adopted once she arrived in Cortona, denying herself the ornaments, foods and comforts she was used to, Margaret had shared her ‘many gifts of fear, sorrow, and tears’ with both the Franciscans and the Cortonese, asking them with such ‘sorrowful groans and sighs’ if she would be rescued from the exile of her sinful life that, as Giunta notes, she ‘made the friars weep’.38 Three themes emerge from this passage to which Giunta will often return. First, it is clear that Margaret’s sinful past had constant ramifications for her present religious life: the reader is repeatedly told that Margaret’s past necessitates and intensifies the rigour of her present religious commitment. Secondly, Margaret’s fear of the Franciscans serves her penitential progress: not only does her ‘filial fear’ of the friars heal her heart but it also arouses in her feelings of shame for her sinful past. Thirdly, Margaret’s behaviour could elicit from the friars strong emotions. Giunta also writes in the Legenda’s first chapter that Christ had reminded Margaret of how she would ‘blush’ whenever she saw one of the friars ‘in church, in a house, or on the street’, and ‘would not dare to sit down or even speak to secular persons’ when she was with friars.39 At the chapter’s end, Giunta provides some context for his repeated references to Margaret’s apprehension. For several years the Franciscans had hesitated to give Margaret their habit of penance, having found her too pretty and too young to believe that she was truly devoted to the penitential life.40 While Giunta goes on to note that the Franciscans did eventually offer her their habit, in the midst of his seemingly celebratory prose we see repeated references to the friars’ misgivings about Margaret’s religious life as well as to Margaret’s awareness of those ongoing concerns. For example, several passages in the text make clear that the friars tested both the orthodoxy of Margaret’s beliefs and the veracity of her visionary claims. Giunta describes how, soon after she became a THE CREATION OF A FRANCISCAN LAY SAINT 69 41 Legenda, II, 1(f). Ibid. Dyan Elliott has looked at this episode in her study of the close connections between the processes that determined sanctity and heresy in the later Middle Ages; see Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton, 2004), 184. 43 Legenda, VI, 17. 44 Ibid. For other episodes in the text suggesting that the Franciscans were actively exploring and testing their lay penitent’s beliefs, see Legenda, VIII, 20, and 22. 45 Legenda, II, 7. 42 Downloaded from http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on August 13, 2015 Franciscan penitent, Margaret embarked upon a marathon eightday confession, at the end of which Christ had promised her that, having been successfully cleansed of her sin, he would begin to call her daughter.41 When Margaret finally did hear Christ call her daughter she collapsed. Some ‘envious people’, as Giunta describes them, insinuated that Margaret had only pretended to collapse. In response, the friars had a number of women drag Margaret on the ground and pull her hair to verify her ecstatic state.42 The friars also tested Margaret verbally. Giunta recounts how he and the guardian of the friars, Friar Ubaldo, had visited Margaret to speak to her about Christ’s Passion. During their conversation, Margaret became ‘overcome with grief’ and told the friars that if she had been present at the crucifixion she would have asked to be sent to hell if it would have saved Christ from suffering.43 Giunta notes that Friar Ubaldo became upset, telling Margaret that such sentiments were ‘contrary to the divine dispensation’ but concludes the episode by noting that after the friars had left, Christ reassured Margaret that he had understood the sentiment of her words and did not think the friars should doubt her.44 The Legenda points to the friars’ doubts in more subtle ways as well. The repeated comparisons Giunta makes between Margaret’s present spiritual progress and her past shame draw upon a hagiographic trope: the saint is all the more holy for the life of sin he or she has transcended. And yet the extent to which Giunta relies on such a trope underscores how much Margaret’s history continued to vex her guardians. Margaret’s transformation is all the more remarkable, Giunta continually notes, because of the depths of sin from which she had emerged. He reminds his reader of the pleasure she had once taken in parading up and down the streets of Montepulciano wearing the ornate clothes, golden hairslides and make-up that marked her status as a kept woman.45 He adds that the routine she 70 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 228 46 Legenda, II, 1(a). For similarities between Margaret and stories told about Mary Magdalen, see Katherine Ludwig Jansen, The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton, 2000), 252, 280–2; and Benvenuti Papi, ‘In castro poenitentiae’, 141–9. 47 Legenda, V, 10. 48 Giunta reports that Margaret rarely spoke to her son and had stopped preparing him meals so she could prepare meals for the poor instead, see Legenda, II 1(b). For evidence that he ended up living with the Arentine Franciscans (and perhaps even became a friar), see Legenda II, 1(g); VI, 15; VIII, 17; IX, 27. 49 ‘Maternal martyrdom’ was quite common in the vitae of thirteenth-century Italian female saints; see Barbara Newman, ‘‘‘Crueel Corage’’: Child Sacrifice and the Maternal Martyr in Hagiography and Romance’, in From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia, 1995), 76– 107; for Newman’s specific discussion of Margaret, see 87–8 and 93–4. Downloaded from http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on August 13, 2015 adopted of fasting, prayer and self-mutilation (often leaving her body covered in bruises and cuts and too weak to get up from the bare floor where she slept) was meant to purge herself of the memories and effects of her former life.46 That former life could not have been far from Giunta’s thoughts when he described Margaret running through the streets of Cortona on one Good Friday ‘as if she were drunk, weeping and groaning, like a mother who had just lost her son’.47 Margaret stopped her circuit of the city when she reached the Franciscans’ convent but would have continued to other churches, Giunta notes, if her sense of decency and fear of the friars had not restrained her. The analogy Giunta uses here — that Margaret groaned ‘like a mother who had just lost her son’ — reminds the reader that Margaret was herself a mother. In other passages, Margaret is presented as having seen her son, whom she eventually sent to live in a Franciscan convent in Arezzo, as both evidence of her former shame and a distraction from her life of penance.48 Like the vitae of many other late medieval mothersaints, the Legenda celebrates Margaret’s neglect of her son; she demonstrates her religious commitment by preferring to care for the poor rather than tend to her son.49 But Giunta’s description of the maternal quality of Margaret’s moaning on Good Friday also seems aimed at reminding his readers of the circumstances that led to her running through the streets and groaning in the first place. Even in her moments of penitential exuberance, the reader seems to be reminded, Margaret cannot shake off her former identity: she will always be a fallen woman, the mother of a bastard son. Giunta’s writing also conveys how aware Margaret was that, in the eyes of others, her past shame continued to stain her present THE CREATION OF A FRANCISCAN LAY SAINT 71 50 Legenda, II, 7. Ibid. In another episode, Giunta forbade Margaret from disfiguring her face in order to ‘make up’ for her ‘offences toward God’. Here he tells her that if she were to disobey, he would stop hearing her confession and the other friars would stop caring for her; see Legenda, II, 8. Caroline Bynum has noted how late medieval theologians often urged religious women to restrain their asceticism and Eucharistic devotion; see Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, 1987), 237–44. 52 Legenda, II, 6. 51 Downloaded from http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on August 13, 2015 identity. He recounts that he had once prevented her from returning to Montepulciano, where, with a shaven head and wearing only a slip, she had planned to ‘shame herself’ publicly by having another woman lead her through the streets on a leash, crying: ‘Here is Margaret, dear people, who has harmed so many in your town with her arrogance, her vanity and her bad example’.50 Although Giunta writes that, ‘under pain of obedience’, he was able to stop her, he still praises her impulse to shame herself, noting that she would eventually be rewarded for such obedience.51 The dramatic nature of these plans as well as Margaret’s decision to alert Giunta to them in advance suggest that she saw such public acts as opportunities not only to prove her obedience to the friars but also to use the people of Cortona’s admiration of her as protection against the Franciscans’ enduring doubts. Giunta refers to Margaret’s growing civic fame when he recounts a night the devil tempted her to take pride in her reputation. Christ had given her so many virtues, the devil noted, that she had become famous among people of all ranks. Margaret’s response to the devil’s observations confirms at the same time as recasts the significance of those words. After hearing the devil’s taunts, Giunta writes, Margaret passed part of the night in silence. Before the night was over, however, she got up and began to shout from the balcony of the house where she was staying, ‘Get up, people of Cortona, get up! Arise I tell you, and drive me out of town with stones, for I am a sinner who has transgressed against God and my neighbours!’ As Margaret continued to weep and wail, Giunta reports that people came from all around to see her and, having ‘only admiration and compassion’, they returned to their homes ‘inspired’ and ‘full of remorse for their own sins’.52 On one hand, Giunta’s recounting of this episode calls attention to the potential dangers Margaret’s growing 72 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 228 53 Caciola, Discerning Spirits, 102. Legenda, VII, 5. 55 For examples, see Legenda, VII, 23; IX, 35; and X, 19. 56 Legenda, V, 3. Giunta begins his account by noting that Margaret had once asked him not to leave his convent after she learned that she would experience a ‘mental 54 (cont. on p. 73) Downloaded from http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on August 13, 2015 reputation and fame brought: her fame could be a source of vanity and pride. But on the other hand, his text also points to the practical and protective results Margaret found by acting on that renown. When she referenced her past sins, Margaret could both control the content of the concerns she knew her Franciscan guardians held about her and inspire her fellow Cortonese to consider their own transgressions. The esteem and devotion her outburst garnered from her neighbours could shield Margaret from the friars’ doubts: how threatening could the friars’ concerns be if all of Cortona viewed her as the city’s holy woman? Caciola has noted the ‘conscious self-fashioning as a saint’ we see when Margaret replied to a woman doubting her penitential transformation that those same people chiding her would eventually be calling her a saint and making pilgrimages to her tomb.53 While Margaret may have been consciously crafting her saintly status, we should not lose sight of the possibility that she cultivated such a reputation in order to protect herself from her doubting guardians. Other passages in the Legenda, however, make clear that Margaret remained worried about how the friars would react to her public displays. While her outbursts won her more devotees among the people of Cortona, they also increased the Franciscans’ misgivings about her. For example, Giunta describes a time when Margaret asked him during a Mass in the church of San Francesco to wait until after the service to give her communion. She was afraid of being seen ‘before the friars’ altar with a rope around her neck and her head uncovered, weeping uncontrollably’, fearing, Giunta adds, that she would be accused of pretence or of fabricating her experiences.54 Giunta also makes several references to times when Margaret refused to give him details about her divine conversations and visions, sometimes ascribing her silences to her great humility, but also explaining that she had withheld information from the friars because of her keen awareness of how she was perceived by others.55 The most dramatic example of Margaret’s public visionary life comes in what Giunta describes as her ‘mental crucifixion’.56 THE CREATION OF A FRANCISCAN LAY SAINT 73 (n. 56 cont.) crucifixion’ inside San Francesco. The detailed description that follows makes clear that he did not listen to her and was present to witness the spectacle. 57 Legenda, V, 3. 58 Legenda, V, 4. Jansen has looked at how the late medieval cult of Mary Magdalen also emphasized her role as the ‘mirror of the laity’; see Jansen, Making of the Magdalen, esp. 49–115. 59 Legenda, V, 5. 60 Legenda, V, 6. 61 Ibid. Downloaded from http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on August 13, 2015 Giunta writes that as Margaret narrated to those around her each moment of Christ’s Passion as it unfolded in her head, her body conveyed the drama of what she saw. She ground her teeth, twisted her body until she became pale, her pulse stopped and finally ‘her body became cold as ice’.57 Her movements were so striking, he writes, that both he and others believed that ‘she was about to die’. And although Christ would reassure her that this vision had been a public affair precisely because she was a ‘mirror of sinners’ who could inspire even the most obstinate of sinners to be saved, when she awoke and saw the people surrounding her, she became upset that she had experienced Christ’s Passion ‘in front of the people, rather than in her cell’.58 Despite her concern, Margaret’s dramatic behaviour continued. Giunta writes that Margaret began to run around the city asking those she passed if they had seen the crucified Christ. Her anxiety was so powerful that during the days that followed she was left unable to eat or sleep and moved those she encountered to tears.59 Finally, during a sermon Giunta delivered in San Francesco not long after this vision, Margaret ‘could not restrain her impulses of sorrow’ and stood up, as Giunta describes, ‘in front of everyone’, shouting ‘like someone out of her mind’. She asked Giunta in such an emotion-filled voice whether he knew where ‘the crucified Lord’ had been taken that the entire congregation burst into tears.60 Giunta’s irritation at the interruption comes through in the text: he notes that he was only able to regain control of his audience by assuring Margaret ‘in a loud voice’ that Christ would make his presence known to all soon.61 Although Giunta includes phrases that aim to praise Margaret’s behaviour — her public outburst was made with ‘sincerity and piety’ and came from someone ‘full of love for Christ’ — his repeated mention that she was acting like someone ‘out of her 74 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 228 62 Legenda, V, 5 and 6. Legenda, V, 9. 64 Ibid. Bargigli da Pelago argued that Giovanni da Castiglione was the ‘newly elected custodian’; see Bargigli da Pelago, Antica leggenda, Note, chap. V, n. 6. While in one passage two chapters after the mention of the Siena meeting, the Legenda does refer to Giovanni as the then-confirmed custodian (‘tunc custode conferrem’, see Legenda, IX, 63), it also mentions that Ranaldo, another Cortonese Franciscan, held this position (see Legenda, I, 1), leaving us far from certain that it was Giovanni who delivered the renunciations. 65 Legenda, V, 9. Angela of Foligno’s confessor and scribe, Friar A. also had his visits limited by the Franciscan provincial minister; see ‘The Memorial’, in Angela of Foligno: Complete Works, trans. Paul Lachance (New York, 1993), chapters VII and IX. 66 Legenda, V, 9. 67 See Bornstein, ‘Uses of the Body’, 169–70; Benvenuti Papi, ‘In castro poenitentiae’, 141–68; Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession, 99 and 111–12; and Burr, Spiritual Franciscans, 325. To some extent, Caciola’s work 63 (cont. on p. 75) Downloaded from http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on August 13, 2015 mind’ and that she was in a state of acute anxiety illustrates the extent to which she not only had annoyed but also had disturbed him.62 His immediate turn to describing the friars’ condemnation of Margaret at their provincial meeting in Siena suggests that after such a dramatic outburst, the order had become convinced that the time had come to act on their long-held concerns. Giunta first mentions the provincial meeting by noting that Margaret had predicted its outcome. She reported that the Holy Spirit had revealed to her that the Franciscans’ doubts about her were based on both ‘scripture and what they had heard from many people suffering from delusion’.63 Margaret’s prophecy, Giunta points out, was correct: ‘the newly elected custodian of Arezzo’ arrived at her cell to inform her that the friars were ‘certain that her whole way of life, her revelations, and her consolations were nothing but deceptions’, adding that they believed she had pretended to have visions ‘in order to become famous among the populace’.64 Margaret was also informed that Giunta’s visits to her would be limited to once every eight days.65 Overwhelmed by this news, trembling and weeping, Margaret begged Christ to help her, crying that she could not do more than she was already doing to deal with the friars, whose doubts about her were terrifying.66 Even though Margaret’s emotional reaction points to how seriously she took the Franciscans’ condemnation, scholars have tended to de-emphasize this denunciation by arguing both that the Franciscans’ misgivings about Margaret were gone by the time of her death and that the Legenda stands as the order’s attempt to argue for her quintessentially Franciscan sanctity.67 THE CREATION OF A FRANCISCAN LAY SAINT 75 (n. 67 cont.) stands apart here. She notes that this episode serves as the text’s ‘thematic arc’, arguing that it probably ‘galvanized debate about Margaret locally’, and brought her to the attention of the provincial chapter; see Caciola, Discerning Spirits, 101 and 104. Nevertheless, Caciola seems to assume, as other scholars relying upon Bargigli da Pelago’s timeline have, that the Franciscans’ misgivings about Margaret had disappeared by the time of her death. 68 Bargigli da Pelago points to Legenda, V, 40. 69 Giunta makes this claim immediately before the description of Margaret’s death: see Legenda, X, 18. 70 Bargigli da Pelago, Antica leggenda, Dissertazioni, 54–5. 71 For example, Badia is called Margaret’s confessor when she asks him to help her make a general confession, see Legenda, X, 16. In addition, in the ‘Testimony of Authenticity’, Giunta lists those friars who had seen the text and refers to Fra Ubaldo of Colle as having also served as Margaret’s confessor; see Legenda, ‘Appendix’. Downloaded from http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on August 13, 2015 Bargigli da Pelago’s timeline has been pivotal in producing these conclusions. In addition to proposing dates (the Franciscans’ provincial meeting, Giunta’s appointment as Margaret’s primary confessor and his move to Siena) that have encouraged readers to assume that the friar did most of his writing after Margaret’s death, this chronology has also led scholars to conclude that Giunta’s absence from Cortona ended shortly before February 1297 and that, as a result, the friar was with Margaret when she died. Two passages from the Legenda appear to support this conclusion. In the first, Margaret claims that Christ had promised her that her confessor would be with her at the moment of her death.68 In the second, Giunta writes that there were many things he was unable to include in the text both because Margaret concealed many of God’s secrets and because he had been away from Cortona for seven years.69 Scholars seem thus to have reasoned that if Giunta was allowed to return to Margaret’s deathbed, the order must by that time have reversed its negative assessment of her.70 But if we look more closely at the text we see that while Christ does reassure Margaret that her confessor will be with her when she dies, it is not clear to which confessor he is referring. Giunta, Ser Badia, as well as other friars are referred to throughout the text as Margaret’s confessors.71 And although Giunta places great and repeated emphasis in the text on Margaret’s connection to and dependence upon the Franciscans, there is no evidence in the text that either he or any other friars were at her side when she died. While throughout much of the text Giunta names each friar 76 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 228 III ‘WHY THE FRIARS OUGHT NOT TO PROMOTE THE ORDER OF PENITENTS’ Scholars’ willingness to accept the assumptions and conclusions embedded in Bargigli da Pelago’s timeline reveal not only Giunta’s success in framing Margaret’s life as a Franciscan story but also the extent to which scholars have approached the history of lay religion in the late medieval cities as a corollary of mendicant history.74 Although both Margaret’s life and cult were undeniably associated with the Cortonese Franciscans, the tension and suspicion that a close reading of the Legenda reveals both Margaret and her guardians felt about their association makes clear that this lay penitent and her mendicant guardians 72 Legenda, X, 19. Legenda, X, 19. 74 For example, new works on both Catherine of Siena and other female Dominicans have taken a keen interest in the connections between these women and the lay communities out of which they emerged; see F. Thomas Luongo, The Saintly Politics of Catherine of Siena (Ithaca, 2006); and Dominican Penitent Women, ed. and trans. Maiju Lehmijoki-Gardner (New York, 2005); Maiju LehmijokiGardner, Worldly Saints: Social Interaction of Dominican Penitent Women in Italy, 1200–1500 (Helsinki, 1999); and Maiju Lehmijoki-Gardner, ‘Writing Religious Rules as an Interactive Process: Dominican Penitent Women and the Making of their Regula’, Speculum, lxxix, 3 (2004). Moreover, scholars looking at the lives of either Clare or Francis of Assisi invariably consider the transformation each undertook from layperson to religious; see André Vauchez, Francis of Assisi: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Saint, trans. Michael F. Cusato (New Haven, 2012); Augustine Thompson, Francis of Assisi: A New Biography (Ithaca, 2012); and Catherine Mooney, ‘Imitatio Christi or Imitatio Mariae? Clare of Assisi and Her Interpreters’ in Catherine M. Mooney (ed.), Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and their Interpreters (Philadelphia, 1999), ch. 4. 73 Downloaded from http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on August 13, 2015 who interacted with Margaret, in the passage describing her death the reader is given only the most general description of the religious present. We learn that when Margaret died and ‘those who were assisting her’ noticed the sweet smell that came from her body, they became convinced that she had been ‘a vessel of holiness’.72 Moreover, as word spread of her death, we are told that it was the Cortonese who rushed up the hill to San Basilio to wrap her body in purple robes and place it in a tomb, doing so ‘in the presence of distinguished persons, clerics and religious’.73 The Legenda thus credits the people of Cortona (and not the Franciscans) as the ones most eager to treat this once fallen woman as a saint. THE CREATION OF A FRANCISCAN LAY SAINT 77 75 (Pseudo)-Bonaventure, Determinationes quaestionum circa regulam fratrum minorum, 337–74. The section concerning the friars’ interaction with lay penitents also appears in Meersseman (ed.), Dossier de l’ordre de la pénitence, 123–4. On the text’s authorship, see Ignatius Brady, ‘The Writings of Saint Bonaventure Regarding the Franciscan Order’, (Miscellanea Francescana, lxxv, 1975), 107. For a brief summary of the author’s explanations for the order’s decline, see David Burr, Olivi and Franciscan Poverty: The Origins of the Usus Pauper Controversy (Philadelphia, 1989), 3–4, and 7; also see Şenocak, The Poor and the Perfect, 193–4. 76 (Pseudo)-Bonaventure, Determinationes quaestionum circa regulam fratrum minorum, 368–9. 77 (Pseudo)-Bonaventure, Determinationes quaestionum circa regulam fratrum minorum, 368. 78 Ibid. Downloaded from http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on August 13, 2015 were far from participants in a single and harmonious narrative. But this raises an obvious question: is Margaret’s case too extreme to warrant a more general rethinking of how we approach the history of lay penitents? Without doubt, her history of sexual and moral transgressions as well as her dramatic penitential life would have made her particularly difficult for any religious organization to embrace. Nevertheless if we turn to look at the concerns voiced by an anonymous friar in the mid thirteenth century, we see how they echo the Cortonese Franciscans’ worries about Margaret, suggesting that she was far from the only lay penitent who troubled the order. Once thought to be the work of Bonaventure but now commonly attributed to an unknown friar, probably of Germanic origin, the Determinations of Questions Concerning the Rule (c.1260) gives a lengthy account of what the author sees as the many causes of his order’s spiritual decline.75 In a section titled ‘Why the friars should not promote the Order of Penitents’, the author lists the risks posed by associations between friars and lay penitents.76 All of the friar’s points converge around issues of control and liability. In short, the author sees the Franciscans’ involvement with penitents as heralding a disastrous loss of freedom as well as potential damage to the order’s reputation. What if a penitent was to be called before an ecclesiastical or secular court? It would be the friars who would be expected to intercede on that penitent’s behalf.77 And, what if either the penitent or his accusers were to point their finger at the Franciscans, arguing that the friars had not done enough to steer their charges toward good behaviour? Or worse, what if either the penitent or his accusers claimed that the friars themselves had encouraged such bad behaviour?78 78 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 228 79 Ibid. (Pseudo)-Bonaventure, Determinationes quaestionum circa regulam fratrum minorum, 369. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid. 80 Downloaded from http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on August 13, 2015 Associations with lay penitents, this author’s questions make clear, present the order with an untenable situation. If they attach themselves to those who are excessively helpless (most often, the author notes, women or Beguines), the friars become not only spiritually but also financially responsible for their charges.79 But if they associate with rich penitents, they will be accused of going after those penitents’ wealth. Moreover, the author notes, such associations only increase the secular clergy’s ire towards the Franciscans: as more penitents placed themselves under the order’s obedience, the friars would stand to gain but the secular clergy would inevitably lose testamentary benefits.80 Finally, the author concludes, an association with lay penitents leaves the order vulnerable to charges of heresy and sexual misconduct. How can the friars guard against heresy when lay penitents’ ministers resemble the teachers of heretics and the penitents themselves remain in their private homes with their spouses and children?81 Imagine the disaster that would befall the order, the author speculates, if a penitent, who had been accused of fornication or adultery, implicated a friar as her accomplice. Who would seem more likely to be responsible for a female penitent’s pregnancy than the friars with whom she had spent all of her time?82 The Determinations’ last points encourage us to speculate as to the motive for the Tuscan friars’ condemnation of Margaret. While we have no direct evidence for why the order denounced her, the friars’ questioning of Margaret’s religious beliefs (Friar Ubaldo’s examination of her ideas about Christ’s Passion, for example) and their reassignment of her primary confessor, Giunta, to Siena suggest that they may have had the same kinds of concerns about Margaret’s beliefs and relationships that the author of the Determinations foresaw in any association between the friars and lay penitents. According to this friar, a connection to a lay penitent was a distracting, dangerous, and potentially disastrous enterprise. Consistent with the many layers that make up the Legenda, however, Margaret’s story does not end with the Franciscans’ condemnation. If we return to this text and explore its descriptions of Margaret’s experiences once THE CREATION OF A FRANCISCAN LAY SAINT 79 she was living away from her Franciscan guardians, we see a radically different understanding of the relationship between lay penitent and religious guardian. IV MARGARET AT SAN BASILIO 83 Legenda, VII, 26. For more on this community, see Doyno, ‘Lilies Among Thorns’, 331–40. 85 Ibid. 86 Roberto Rusconi, ‘Margherita da Cortona: Peccatrice redenta e patrona cittadina’, in Umbria: Sacra e civile ( Turin, 1989), 89–104; Bornstein, ‘Uses of the Body’, 167; and Caciola, Discerning Spirits, 108. 87 Iozzelli has posited that Giunta relied upon Badia for reports of Margaret while the friar was in Siena; see Iozzelli, ‘Introduzione’, in Legenda, 37–8. In addition to passages that explicitly identify Ser Badia as their witness, the text also contains several references to Badia writing about his experiences with Margaret. For example, in one 84 (cont. on p. 80) Downloaded from http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on August 13, 2015 In the middle of the Legenda’s seventh chapter, the reader is told that on 1 May (the year is not given), Margaret decided to move from her cell near the church of San Francesco to another cell attached to the run-down church of San Basilio, half a mile above the city centre, in order ‘to escape the tumult of society and human contacts’.83 Such an explanation is at odds with both the text’s descriptions of the community of lay penitents that formed around Margaret at San Basilio as well as the many charters that detail the process of rebuilding that church.84 These sources make clear that the community of lay penitents which attended to Margaret during the last years of her life and remained at the church to manage her cult was sizeable and active.85 Margaret does not, therefore, seem to have found a life of solitude when she left the centre of Cortona. While scholars have suspected that Margaret’s decision to move was motivated by her desire to escape the doubts and condemnation of her Franciscan guardians, they have not explored the way the tone and content of the descriptions of her religious life changed once she left the city centre.86 While we have no direct evidence that any Franciscans were with her when she died, it is plausible that Ser Badia, Margaret’s confessor at San Basilio, was. It also seems likely that during the seven years that Giunta was in Siena, Ser Badia served as Margaret’s primary confessor and, perhaps at Giunta’s request, kept track of his interactions with her in writing.87 And if we work 80 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 228 (n. 87 cont.) passage, Christ encourages Margaret not to worry if at times the cleric does not believe the things he has written about her; see Legenda, VII, 33. While Giunta describes himself in the text’s prologue as having compiled (or as the unworthy compiler of) the various events and details of Margaret’s life, there are many passages where either no witness is named or the witness is simply referred to as Margaret’s confessor, leaving the reader unsure who it was who saw and reported each of her visions and conversations with Christ. For example, see Legenda, VIII, 2. 88 Although it is difficult, if not impossible, to identify all of the passages in the Legenda written after Margaret’s move, many of the episodes recorded in the fifth to tenth chapters seem to describe events that took place at San Basilio. 89 Mary Harvey Doyno, ‘‘‘A Particular Light of Understanding’’: Margaret of Cortona, the Franciscans, and a Cortonese Cleric’, in Rachel Fulton and Bruce W. Holsinger (eds.), History in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person (New York, 2007), 68–78. 90 Doyno, ‘A Particular Light of Understanding’, 74–6. Downloaded from http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on August 13, 2015 backwards from the description of Margaret’s death to look at the Legenda with fresh eyes that have not been conditioned to see the Franciscans as having only a passing mistrust of their lay penitent, we can see that, in many of the episodes describing her religious life once she was living at San Basilio, Margaret is no longer the public penitent, whose dramatic performances Giunta interpreted as aiming to redeem her past shame.88 Instead, at San Basilio Ser Badia describes Margaret as a visionary whose primary task is to relay the words of Christ. In short, the suspicion and concern that so marked the Cortonese friars’ interaction with Margaret and that we see echoed in the Determinations are nowhere to be found. In many of the passages that seem to refer to her time at San Basilio, the Legenda describes Margaret relaying advice that Christ had given to her to pass on to Ser Badia. Christ’s advice for Badia makes clear that, like Margaret, this cleric has had a conversion experience; his sinful past shapes both his present religious commitment and his facility as Margaret’s confessor.89 Instead of raising questions about the validity of Margaret’s experiences or emphasizing the difference between confessor and penitent, these episodes portray Margaret and Badia sharing a similar spiritual history and devotional attitude.90 Moreover, in episodes describing Margaret’s time at San Basilio that do not specifically mention Badia, we also see a portrait of her that is strikingly different from the depictions of her life in the centre of Cortona. In one of the first passages to convey the effect the Franciscans’ condemnation had on her, the reader is told that Christ had told THE CREATION OF A FRANCISCAN LAY SAINT 81 91 92 93 94 Legenda, V, 12. Legenda, V, 13. Legenda, IX, 35 and 40. Legenda, IX, 40. Downloaded from http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on August 13, 2015 Margaret that while in the past she had proclaimed his Passion ‘in a loud voice and with inconsolable tears’, she now remained silent ‘out of fear of being accused of vainglory’. Although Christ goes on to encourage her to return to her more dramatic devotions and ‘not to fear the whispering of worldly people’ who were questioning her behaviour, the text includes no further description of the kinds of visionary spectacles that marked her time living in Cortona.91 Instead of describing how her body illustrated the fervour of her spiritual experiences, the text gives an extended account of the words Christ funnelled through Margaret, which first proclaim the details of his life and Passion, and then lament the dismal moral shape of contemporary urban society.92 This is not to say, however, that the Legenda gives no sense of a physical dimension to Margaret’s visionary life at San Basilio. In a vision that Margaret experienced in her San Basilio cell during Advent, the saint claimed to have seen an angel with six wings in the midst of flames appear above her. But while the reader is told that she lay limp in the arms of her companions, the text’s emphasis is not on describing or interpreting her physical demeanour but rather on conveying the details of the complaints Christ funnels through Margaret. Christ laments the sins of ‘bad virgins, married people . . . widows . . . cheating merchants and depraved usurers’, he bemoans ‘lying merchants’, who in their wish to profit ‘conceal the flaws in their merchandise . . . [and] with malice and deception of their neighbours’ either ‘pass off inferior goods as being of higher quality’, or ‘defraud their customers with their weights and measures’.93 He tells Margaret that he deplores ‘the married who debase the state of matrimony’ claiming that ‘they should really be called adulterers’, and that he is grieved by people’s interest in the latest fashions in clothes and jewellery, which ‘fill the soul with obscene thoughts’. Finally, he informs her that he takes no pleasure in the prayers, pilgrimages, almsgiving, fasts and other good works performed by those who engage in ‘the use of perfumes, ornaments and ribbons’.94 82 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 228 95 Legenda, II, 7. Legenda, IX, 40. 97 Legenda, V, 4. 98 Margaret is referred to as the ‘mirror of sinners’, ‘a model of patience’, and ‘a mirror in eternal life for all sinners’; see Legenda VII, 13, 20 and IX, 42. 96 Downloaded from http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on August 13, 2015 The references to Margaret’s own past are hard to miss here. We know from Giunta’s descriptions in the first half of the Legenda how much pride Margaret took in her appearance as she paraded up and down the streets of Montepulciano as a nobleman’s concubine.95 But in these references, Margaret’s past is no longer a burden hampering her present religious life but something that allows her to be the perfect messenger of Christ’s grievances. In effect, the text seems to argue that Margaret’s past has made her all the more able to show other laywomen and laymen the path to salvation. At the end of his long list of complaints, Christ notes that although he has endured insults and beatings, urban sinners ‘will not tolerate even a word of criticism’, because, as he tells Margaret, ‘they refuse to see me as their mirror and model of behaviour and listen to sermons about me’.96 The phrase ‘mirror and model’ appears elsewhere in the Legenda. During her ‘mental crucifixion’, Christ had reassured Margaret that it had been a public event precisely so that she might inspire others as ‘the mirror of sinners’.97 In addition, in several conversations that seem to take place at San Basilio, Christ tells Margaret that her penitential transformation has made her a mirror and model for the laity.98 Acting therefore more as a proxy for Christ’s words than as a representation of his suffering, Margaret relays criticism of her contemporary world at the same time as she embodies the potential for its penitential transformation. Instead of serving to raise concern about the validity of her new religious life, references made to her past during the time she was living at San Basilio are used to encourage the Cortonese to identify with Margaret and model their own conversions on hers. As a result, the Legenda begins to adopt a more straightforward and recognizable strategy to argue for Margaret’s sanctity. Instead of seeing her behaviour as attempts to make up for her sinful past, the San Basilio passages are more concerned to relay how Margaret’s visionary experiences influence others. In this vein, the text goes on to describe how Margaret became known for THE CREATION OF A FRANCISCAN LAY SAINT 83 praying for the release of souls from purgatory and how her reputation for effective prayers was so strong that people came to her not only from far away provinces but also from purgatory to seek her aid.99 Moreover, we hear about the extensive help Margaret offered her neighbours, often leading them to make full confessions.100 And finally, we learn of Margaret’s work to secure peace within the city of Cortona and with its external rivals, activities that briefly bring her back into contact with Giunta.101 REASSESSING MARGARET In the Legenda’s eighth chapter, Christ orders Margaret to call Giunta back from Siena so that he can help broker a peace between the Rosso family and the Cortonese. In a passage that appears to have been written by Giunta, the friar reveals that this was not the first time he had tried to arrange such a truce between the Cortonese citizens and this family. He writes that during his first attempt he had been distracted by doubts he had about Margaret and had been tempted ‘to turn against the daughter of God’. In a candid passage, Giunta reveals that he had begun to believe that Margaret was ‘indiscreet in her devotions and excessive in her austerities’. He notes that as a result he had stopped visiting her for several days. Margaret, Giunta writes, nevertheless, continued to pray for him ‘with such sweetness’ that Christ told her to relay to Giunta that he wanted the friar ‘to lead an apostolic life and take comfort in me [Christ]’. Christ goes on to tell Margaret that Giunta’s ‘tribulations are my sign’, and that the friar should not only ‘counsel souls without hurrying’ but also try not to ‘worry about what people say about him, since many murmured against me, his creator’. Finally Christ tells Margaret to instruct Giunta to ‘reflect on my Passion’, a time, 99 For example, in one episode, Margaret received visits from the souls of two shoemakers who had been murdered before they had the chance to confess their sins; see Legenda, VIII, 5. For more on medieval women’s particular role in advocating for those in purgatory, see Barbara Newman, ‘On the Threshold of the Dead: Purgatory, Hell, and Religious Women’, in Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist, ch. 4. 100 Legenda, IX, 30–4. 101 Legenda, VIII, 12–13. Downloaded from http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on August 13, 2015 V 84 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 228 102 Legenda, VIII, 12. John Coakley, ‘The Limits of Religious Authority: Margaret of Cortona and Giunta Bevegnati’, in Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and their Male Collaborators (New York, 2006), 130–48. 104 Legenda, IV, 16 and 18. 103 Downloaded from http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on August 13, 2015 he notes, ‘when many of those who crucified me later adored me’. Christ ends his advice to Giunta by encouraging the friar ‘to work diligently to achieve peace among the people of Cortona’, for, as he relays through Margaret, ‘I will be with him in everything’.102 In his study of the Legenda’s portrait of the relationship between Margaret and Giunta, John Coakley has argued that we can see Giunta’s hand directing Margaret’s conversations with Christ away from her own devotional experience and towards applying that connection to helping others.103 In the passage above, Giunta seems to be doing exactly this, but for his own benefit. Just as we saw emphasized in the interactions between Margaret and Ser Badia, Christ notes here how Giunta’s doubts are opportunities for the friar’s own spiritual growth. By revealing his misgivings toward Margaret, Giunta stakes out a connection to Christ that mirrors one that Margaret has had. And while the murmurings and tribulations that Christ notes that Giunta faces could be the result of his efforts to establish peace in Cortona, we might also wonder if such difficulties were the consequence of his relationship with Margaret. In fact, we might wonder if Giunta has provided his readers with a clue to explain the text’s disorder. On one hand, the Legenda articulates the deep and continuing concerns the Franciscans had about Margaret. But on the other hand, it also makes clear that at some point, and as this passage seems to suggest, most likely before her death, Giunta no longer agreed with his order’s negative assessment. In several passages, Margaret claims that Christ had warned her about the hardships — the ‘murmurings’ and ‘tribulations’ — that both she and the Franciscan order were already experiencing and would continue to face. For example, Christ prefaces an extended description of his Passion by warning Margaret that she will ‘be in the furnace of suffering’ until the day she dies, and that with each new consolation that he grants her arises ‘a new army of jealous enemies’.104 Christ goes on to make an explicit connection between his suffering and Margaret’s: just as ‘the world despised and did not know me’, he reassures THE CREATION OF A FRANCISCAN LAY SAINT 85 105 Legenda, V, 24. Legenda, IV, 18. 107 Scholars who have taken up this question include: Maria Caterina Jacobelli, Una donna senza volto (Rome: Edizioni Borla, 1992); Mario Sensi, ‘Margherita da Cortona nel contesto storico-sociale’ Collectanea franciscana 69 (1999): 223–62; and Piero Scappecchi, ‘Santa Margherita nella società cortonese del XIII secolo: Appunti sul ‘liber fraternitatis Sancta Marie de Misericordia de Cortona’ e alter fonti margaritiane’. Accademia Etrusca di Cortona Annuario 28 (1997–98): 183–206; and Burr, Spiritual Franciscans. 108 For example, in the same chapter in which Christ outlines the coming tribulations for the friars, the reader learns that ‘Friar Conrad, beloved of God’ had come ‘from a distant province’ to see Margaret: Legenda, IX, 24. Scholars have suspected that this refers to Conrad of Offida (d. 1307). In addition, in his ‘Testament of Authenticity’, Giunta mentions that Napoleone Orsini, the papal legate and spiritual sympathizer, had held the Legenda in Rome for several months before coming to Cortona to give his approval of the text; Legenda, 389. Finally, Ubertino da Casale, the author of the Arbor vitae and a known spiritual leader, is named in that declaration as well, having accompanied Orsini to Cortona as his agent. Ubertino is also mentioned within the Legenda: he accompanies Margaret’s son to her cell after the boy was caught sleeping through Matins at the Franciscan convent where he was living. 109 Burr, Spiritual Franciscans, 325–34. Burr’s analysis, however, does rely on Bargigli da Pelago’s faulty timeline. He writes that while it is impossible to say exactly when Giovanni da Castiglione ordered Giunta to compose the Legenda, it probably occurred sometime between Margaret’s death in 1297 and late 1307. As I 106 (cont. on p. 86) Downloaded from http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on August 13, 2015 Margaret, ‘it is my will that you too be despised, and that people murmur about you’.105 In other conversations, Christ makes clear that it is not just Margaret but also her Franciscan guardians who will endure tribulations and sufferings. Like Margaret, Christ notes, the Friars Minor would face ‘murmurings’; and, just as she should not be concerned the friars also should not worry, since people murmured about him as well.106 Such references to tribulations on the horizon for the Franciscan order have led scholars to wonder if Margaret and Giunta had associations with the Franciscan spirituals, those friars who criticized what they saw as the order’s relaxed interpretation of Francis’s call for poverty and humility.107 The Legenda’s mention of several people known to have either been members or supporters of the spiritual wing has added weight to this suspicion.108 In an appendix to his study of the Franciscan spirituals, David Burr provides a valuable survey of the scholarship on this subject and concludes that even though there is ‘very little evidence’ directly to support it, Mario Sensi’s argument that Giunta was attempting to whitewash Margaret’s association with known spiritual sympathizers seems plausible.109 I would argue, however, that any attempt to place 86 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 228 (n. 109 cont.) have noted, the Legenda make clear that Giovanni died while Margaret was still alive, and other datable references in the text suggest that Giunta had begun to write about Margaret long before her 1297 death. 110 We can assume, however, that the mention of known spirituals was a factor in Margaret being denied canonization in 1325 when Cortona’s commune and the lay penitential community living at San Basilio presented her case to the papacy, a period when the persecution of the spirituals was quite active. For more on the joint efforts of the commune and lay community to have Margaret canonized, see Cannon and Vauchez, Margherita of Cortona and the Lorenzetti, 157–8; and Doyno, ‘Lily Among Thorns’, 345–8. 111 Joanna Cannon, ‘Beyond the Limitations of Visual Typology: Reconsidering the Function and Audience of Three Vita Panels of Women Saints c.1300’, in Italian Panel Painting of the Duecento and Trecento, ed. Victor M. Schmidt (New Haven, 2002), 291–313. 112 Ibid., 296. 113 In the ‘Testament of Authenticity’, Giunta writes that a Friar Ubertino of Genoa had seen the text ‘and preached about it’ and also notes that after Napoleone Orsini (cont. on p. 87) Downloaded from http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on August 13, 2015 Margaret in one or the other Franciscan camp is, to some extent, a meaningless exercise. As a laywoman, Margaret had no opportunity to attach herself formally to either Franciscan wing. Nevertheless, her lay status would still have given her the freedom to associate with a variety of friars, who we can assume might have had difficulty associating with each other. There is no denying that the text uses an apocalyptic language that would have been familiar within contemporary Franciscan circles. But we are left to wonder if the many references to the persecution, tribulations and murmurings that both Margaret and the order will face say more about the pressure and perhaps persecution faced by both Giunta and other friars who supported Margaret as they attempted to rehabilitate her reputation, than about a spiritual agenda.110 In her study of the vita-panel that was probably painted in the decade after Margaret’s death, and thus before Giunta had completed the Legenda, Joanna Cannon has noted how much more suited this piece of visual hagiography was to instruct the laity on Margaret’s sanctity than was the Legenda.111 In addition to describing the Legenda as ‘long’ and ‘diffuse’, Cannon points out that it was neither translated nor abridged in the vernacular during the Middle Ages.112 Coupled with the fact that only three medieval manuscripts of the text survive, it seems unlikely that Giunta’s text was used as preaching material, as he mentions in his ‘Testament of Authenticity’ he intended it to be.113 Instead, as this study has argued, it seems more plausible that the Legenda THE CREATION OF A FRANCISCAN LAY SAINT 87 (n. 113 cont.) had held a copy of the text in Rome, it had been made available to all who wanted to use it for preaching; see Legenda, ‘Appendix’, 477–8. 114 This study has not considered the miracle accounts written by Giunta in 1311 and appended to the earliest copy of the Legenda, which deserve their own study. It is interesting to note in passing however that while Cannon has argued that these accounts convey that the Cortonese Franciscans and the lay community at San Basilio were sharing supervision of Margaret’s cult, only one miracle names any other friars besides Giunta as witnesses, suggesting that the Franciscans were not active in promoting Margaret’s cult in the decade after her death; see Cannon and Vauchez, Margherita of Cortona and the Lorenzetti, 157–8; and Doyno, ‘Lily Among Thorns’, 322–31. Downloaded from http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on August 13, 2015 was Giunta’s attempt to convince his order of Margaret’s sanctity. Read in this way, the text’s disorder as well as Giunta’s own admission that he had been preoccupied, suggest the difficulties he must have encountered when he tried to reimagine this troublesome lay penitent as an emblem of Franciscan ideals.114 The Legenda’s disorder keeps us from coming to exact conclusions: we do not know when Giunta changed the purpose of his text, exactly what led him to such a change, and precisely to whom his pleas that Margaret was not only a saint but also a quintessentially Franciscan saint were directed. But my dismantling of Bargigli da Pelago’s timeline and the assumptions it has produced demonstrates that the Legenda is far from a straightforward piece of hagiography. Moreover, my identification not only of the tensions, suspicions and recriminations that are buried within the text’s seemingly celebratory prose but also of the related anxieties held by the anonymous Franciscan author of the Determinations demonstrate how wary the friars were of forming associations with lay penitents. Despite these conclusions, one might still question the extent to which such sentiments suggest a prevalent reluctance within the Franciscan order to embrace lay penitents. Both Margaret’s past and her behaviour as a penitent placed her in sharp distinction from most thirteenth-century lay penitents; moreover, the Determinations could be dismissed as the point of view of one exceptionally cranky friar. The path toward a broader application of this evidence can be found in pairing it with an early Franciscan effort to create a history of their Third Order. In the late fourteenth century, around the same time that the Cortonese Franciscans finally assumed control of Santa Margherita (the former San Basilio 88 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 228 115 Bartholomew of Pisa, De Conformitate Vitae Beati Francisci ad Vitam Domini, in Analecta Franciscana v. 4 and 5 (1906–1912). 116 Earlier examples include the Umbrian, Catalogus Sanctorum Fratum Minorum (c.1335) and the Memorabilia de Sanctis Fratribus Minoribus (c.1320); for more on these texts, see Bert Roest, Reading the Book of History: Intellectual Contexts and Educational Functions of Franciscan Historiography, 1226–c.1350 (Groningen, 1996), 71–2. 117 The transfer of Rose’s body to Viterbo’s Damanite convent within a decade of her death seems more to reflect a settlement in the dispute between Santa Maria del Poggio’s priest and the city’s Poor Clares than it does of a Franciscan-led cult since there is no evidence that the friars promoted Rose before the fourteenth century. See Rose Mincuzzi, ‘Santa Rosa da Viterbo Penitente del XIII Secolo’, Analecta Tertii Ordinis Regularis Sancti Francisci 31 (2000), 7–20. 118 Mincuzzi, ‘Santa Rosa’. Downloaded from http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on August 13, 2015 and location of Margaret’s tomb), Friar Bartholomew of Pisa was writing the De conformitate vitae Beati Francisi ad vitam Domini Jesu, an extensive account of the lives and miracles of his order’s most celebrated members.115 While Bartholomew’s text was not the first Franciscan text to list the saintly members of the order, it was the first to include a section dedicated to members of the Third Order.116 What is most striking about Bartholomew’s list is his inclusion of other so-called Third Order saints, for whom, like Margaret, we have no direct evidence of a Franciscansponsored cult before the late fourteenth century. Thus in addition to Margaret, Bartholomew lists Rose of Viterbo (d. 1251), the teenage penitent who was exiled for preaching her support for the papacy while the city was under Emperor Frederick II’s control, and Lucchese of Poggibonsi (d. 1260), the Tuscan merchant who after the death of his children took up a strict life of penance with his wife, Bonadonna. Although both Rose and Lucchese seem to have had some association with their cities’ friars, the order did not begin to promote either as a saint until the late fourteenth century. Thus in the first years after Rose’s death, it was the priest of Santa Maria del Poggio, Rose’s parish church and burial place, who pushed for a monastery to be founded in her name, provoking objections from the nearby Damianite convent that had refused admission to Rose during her lifetime.117 The attempt to ‘Franciscanize’ Rose coincided with a second appeal for canonization launched during Calixtus III’s papacy in the mid fifteenth century.118 The thirteenthcentury evidence documenting the creation of Lucchese’s cult in Poggibonsi, moreover, comes overwhelmingly from communal documents, which emphasize the layman’s role as a THE CREATION OF A FRANCISCAN LAY SAINT 89 119 Lucchese’s name shows up Poggibonsi’s 1300 as well as 1333 civic statutes; Martino Bertagna has transcribed those statutes; see his ‘Note e documenti intorno a S. Lucchese’, Archivum franciscanum historicum 62 (1969): 3–114. 120 See J. Bollandus and G. Henschenius, Acta Sanctorum . . . editio novissima, ed. J. Carnandet et al., 3rd edn (Paris, 1863–87), Apr. III, 594–610. 121 Works that repeat that story and emphasize Lucchese and Bonadonna as particularly Franciscan saints include Agostino Neri, Vita del Beato Lucchese, terziario francescano (Assisi, 1890); and Francesco Mattesini, Le origini del terz’ordine francescano: regola antica e vita del Beato Lucchese (Milan, 1964). 122 The literature on Elizabeth of Hungary is extensive; a good place to begin would be Kenneth Baxter Wolf, The Life and Afterlife of Elizabeth of Hungary: Testimony from her Canonization Hearings (Oxford, 2011); and M. P. Alberzoni, ‘Elisabetta di Turgingia, Chiara d’Assisi, Agnese di Boemia: note sulla prima diffusione dell’ordine dei frati minori in Germania’, Frate Francesco, lxxiii (2007), 383–417; on Umiliana de’Cerchi, see Benvenuti Papi, ‘In castro poenitentiae’, 59–98; on Pier Pettinaio, see Luigi de Angelis, Vita del Beato Pier Pettinajo senese del terz’ordine di San Francesco volgarizeata da una leggenda latin del 1333 per F. Serafino Ferri Agostiniano di Lecceto l’anno 1508 (Siena, 1802). Downloaded from http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on August 13, 2015 new civic patron.119 Although it seems likely that Lucchese had a Franciscan confessor, who wrote a now lost account of the miracles taking place at his tomb, we have no direct evidence that the order as a whole worked to promote his cult until the late fourteenth century, when Friar Bartolomeo de’ Tomei di Siena produced this lay saint’s first vita.120 It is in this vita that we first hear the story of Francis of Assisi’s supposed visit to Poggibonsi to make Lucchese and his wife the founding members of his Third Order; a story often repeated in later biographies of the saint.121 But Bartholomew also includes lay penitents for whom there is evidence of Franciscan interest in the thirteenth century. What is most striking in such cases is that these penitents all had ties during their lifetimes to either their families or a civic institution; associations that would have relieved the friars from being these penitents’ primary guardians. Thus, the princess turned penitent, Elizabeth of Hungary (d. 1231) was a member of a royal family, the Florentine widow, Umiliana de’ Cerchi (d. 1246) lived a cloistered life in her family’s Florentine tower, and the Sienese comb-maker Pier Pettinaio (d.1289) worked on behalf of both the Sienese commune as well as the city’s main hospital, Santa Maria della Scala.122 Margaret, Rose and Lucchese, however, had all renounced their past identities to take up their new lives of penance. They had organized their religious lives outside a family or institutional context; they were, in effect, crafting their own versions of the vita apostolica. 90 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 228 Downloaded from http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on August 13, 2015 Thus it should come as no surprise that at the same time that both the Legenda and the Determinations were expressing the friars’ profound ambivalence toward lay penitents, the order itself was keeping its distance from the cults of lay penitents who had carved out largely independent lay religious lives. In creating a set of Third Order saints and claiming connections with the same lay penitents the Franciscans had ignored in the thirteenth century, Bartholomew of Pisa performed a neutralizing move similar to that which I have argued we see taking place in both Giunta’s Legenda and Bargigli da Pelago’s timeline: he encourages his readers to see harmony where there was in fact contention, interest where there was in fact avoidance, and connection when there was in fact division. And by doing so, the history of lay penitents becomes subsumed into the history of the Franciscan order. My exploration of the relationships between Franciscans and lay penitents makes clear the need to rethink some of the broader ideas scholars have about the friars’ role in and reaction to the explosion of lay religious enthusiasm in late medieval Europe. While the mendicant presence and growing power within cities may have placed the Franciscans in an ideal position to serve as the arbiters of lay religion, claims for religious prerogative and power made by someone like Margaret tested their ability to embrace all lay religious enthusiasm. If an unwed mother, who had once so loved her fine clothes, her jewellery and her ability to flaunt her good looks and powerful lover, could undergo such a dramatic conversion experience as to leave her in constant conversation with Christ, was there any need for such arbiters in the first place? And, if the Franciscans regularly used provincial inquisitors, such as Giovanni da Castiglione in the case of Margaret, to organize their interactions with the growing population of lay penitents, to what extent were those relationships organized around feelings of suspicion and doubt? With their own religious identity and authority still a relatively new phenomenon in the late thirteenth century, we can imagine that the friars may have felt all the more sceptical, suspicious, and perhaps resentful of the many conversion stories and visionary claims emerging from the lay population. Although Giunta’s revisions illustrate that the relationship between friar and lay penitent could be one of mutual nourishment, the Legenda should also remind us that the mendicants used their expanding THE CREATION OF A FRANCISCAN LAY SAINT 91 California State University, Sacramento Mary Harvey Doyno 123 For a study of those letters, see Michael F. Cusato, The Early Franciscan Movement (1205–1239): History, Sources, and Hermeneutics (Spoleto, 2009), 153–208. 124 Şenocak, The Poor and the Perfect, 21, 24, 41 and passim. Downloaded from http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on August 13, 2015 role as the guardians of urban lay religious life as an opportunity to assert their authority over, as well as to mark their distinction from, the lay world. Both the Legenda and the Determinations paint a picture of friars’ ambivalence and antipathy towards a population out of which Francis had not only emerged, but also seems in his two ‘Letters to the Faithful’ to have wanted to create a new order.123 Despite Francis’ hopes of creating an order of uneducated laymen, by the mid thirteenth century the Franciscan order had a resolutely clerical and educated identity.124 Although this article has not taken up the history of the Franciscan Third Order, the friars’ reticence about embracing lay penitents offers one explanation for why it took nearly two generations after Francis’ death for that lay order to take shape. The late medieval understanding that the vita apostolica was particularly available within the lay world marked a profound shift in the history of Christian piety. Yet this shift came during a period of significant growth for the institutional church. In such a context, no matter how apostolic lay religious fervour might have appeared, it needed the approval of church authorities to be deemed both sincere and orthodox. In receiving such approval, the friars themselves had lost their lay identity. Is it then any surprise that those friars would hold penitents such as Rose of Viterbo, Lucchese of Poggibonsi and Margaret of Cortona, all of whom had fashioned independent religious lives, at a distance? The pervasiveness of suspicion and doubt that I have argued marked the beginnings of Margaret of Cortona’s cult brings into stark relief a fundamental irony of late medieval history: while the Franciscans were celebrated for exemplifying a lay apostolic spirit, their new authority required them to look with concern and mistrust upon precisely the laymen and laywomen who were pursuing the same ideals that they had once championed.

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"The Creation of A Franciscan Lay Saint: Margaret of Cortona and Her Legenda"

"The Creation of A Franciscan Lay Saint: Margaret of Cortona and Her Legenda"

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