Tuscany's Noble Treasures: Conceptualizing Female Religious Life in Medieval Italy

In the Middle Ages, the region of Tuscany and its surrounding area was, for around 150 years, home to a surprising number of holy women, from the birth of Margaret of Cortona in 1247 to the death of Catherine of Siena in 1380, with the fourteenth century seeing the greatest of them. While Catherine of Siena has received worldwide recognition, women like Agnes of Montepulciano and Angela of Foligno have received little attention outside their homeland. Yet they and others are important figures in what is a largely unrecognised movement of Tuscan mystics. Their individual stories are enhanced by the efforts of artists and writers which all help to create a recognisable type of religious woman.

This study looks first at the underlying influences on Tuscan mysticism, from the legend of St Katherine of Alexandria through to the celebration of women in the secular literature of the High Middle Ages and the effect of the emerging monastic orders. It examines the life and work of Tuscan holy women and focuses in particular on how they were perceived in their largely patriarchal contexts and by the artists, biographers and "men of God" who brought their own cultural assumptions to bear on the telling of their story. In consequence, the power that stemmed from their godly lives was to varying degrees undermined by some of the people closest to them and eroded by the church itself.

This story of women alternately constrained and encouraged by their social contexts is one of individual struggles and collective achievement. Although the movement in Italy began to fade away after the death of Catherine of Siena, the mystic tradition would live on in other parts of Europe, where the experiences of holy women such as Margery Kempe or, later, Teresa of Ávila will have much in common with their Tuscan predecessors.