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STIGMATIZED HOLY WOMEN AS FEMALE CHrISTS*

In the late Middle Ages, saintly individuals’ reception of the stig-mata was perceived as the foremost sign of their holiness. Yet as the de-sire for physical signs that authenticated one’s saintliness increased, so did the disagreement about the nature of genuine stigmatization1. This article focuses on the gender dimension of the controversy surround-ing the construction of stigmatization as an irrefutable sign of holiness. It explores the attempts to promote female stigmatics, and delineates the ways in which these challenged deeply-entrenched theological pre-sumptions. In response to the claims that St. Francis (d. 1226) had been transformed into Christ at the time of His stigmatization, it argues, the supporters of female Dominican mystics in renaissance Italy hailed them as incarnated female Christs, and even proposed that the miracle of their stigmatization surpassed that of Francis’s reception of the stig-mata.

1. Francis of Assisi as Alter Christus.

The word «stigmata» appears in the New Testament only once, in St. Paul’s epistle to the Galatians, where the Apostle declares: «I bear the stigmata of Lord Jesus Christ on my body»2. In the first centuries of Christianity, this verse was understood symbolically, as indicating «that

* I thank Alessandra Bartolomei-romagnoli, George Ferzoco, Gábor Klaniczay, Aviad Kleinberg, Moshe Sluhovsky, and the two anonymous readers at the «Archivio italiano per la storia della pietà» for their helpful comments. research for this essay was supported by the Israel Science Foundation, grant number 292/10.

1 See r. rusconi, La verità dei segni ovvero i segni della verità, in Autorität und Wahrheit. Kirchliche Vorstellungen, Normen und Verfahren (13.-15. Jahrhundert), ed. G. L. Potestà, Munich, Oldenbourg, 2011, pp. 45-63: 55-62.

2 Gal. 6, 17: «ego enim stigmata Domini Jesu in corpore meo porto».

«Archivio italiano per la storia della pietà», XXVI (2013) ©2014 Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura – www.storiaeletteratura.it ISSN (paper): 1128-6768 ISBN (paper): 978-88-6372-555-1 ISBN (e-book): 978-88-6372-682-4

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the world has been crucified to [St. Paul], and he to the world»3. It was only in the thirteenth century that Franciscan writers began interpreting St. Paul’s remark literally, in their attempts to explain the miraculous ap-pearance of the wounds of Christ’s Crucifixion on the body of St. Francis.

By the time Francis’s stigmata marks were believed to have appeared, during the 1220s, the presence of such wounds had long been a devo-tional convention in the Christian West. Driven by the desire to imitate the suffering of Jesus, pious Christians tortured their bodies by self-flag-ellation or by cutting out pieces of their flesh. An early account of Fran-cis’s stigmatization implied that the appearance of the five wounds on his body was self-inflicted, too4. Chiara Frugoni has argued that Francis and the companions who first described his mystical experience on Mt. La Verna interpreted it only in spiritual – and not in physical – terms. Later theologians, however, stressed the physical aspects of Francis’s assimila-tion to Christ, thereby turning the occurrence at La Verna into the major event in the life of the Poor Man from Assisi. Bonaventure of Bagnoregio (d. 1274) and subsequent Franciscan authors presented Francis as a new type of saint, one who had been transformed through divine intervention into an alter Christus5.

In his Itinerarium mentis in Deum (The Soul’s Journey into God, 1259) Bonaventure compares Francis to St. Paul, who affirms in his second epistle to the Corinthians: «I know a man in Christ; above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I know not, or out of the body, I know not; God Knoweth), such a one caught up to the third heaven. And I know such a man, (whether in the body, or out of the body, I know not: God Knoweth); that he was caught up into paradise and heard secret words, which it is not granted to man to utter»6.

3 A. I. Davidson, Miracles of Bodily Transformation, or How St. Francis Received the Stigmata, «Critical Inquiry», XXXV (Spring 2009), pp. 451-480: 456.

4 r. Trexler, The Stigmatized Body of Francis of Assisi: Conceived, Processed, Disappeared, in r. Trexler, Religion in Social Context in Europe and America, Tempe, AZ, Arizona Center for Medieval and renaissance Studies, 2002, pp. 183-226: 211-215. For a critique of Trexler’s view see A. Vauchez, Francis of Assisi: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Saint, trans. M. F. Cusato, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2012, pp. 225-228.

5 C. Frugoni, Francesco e l’invenzione delle stimmate. Una storia per parole e immag-ini fino a Bonaventura e Giotto, Torino, Einaudi, 1993, esp. pp. 150-182.

6 2 Cor. 12, 2-4: «Scio hominem in Christo ante annos quattuordecim, sive in cor-pore nescio, sive extra corpus nescio, Deus scit, raptum huiusmodi usque ad tertium caelum. Et scio huiusmodi hominem sive in corpore, sive extra corpus nescio, Deus scit: quoniam raptus est in paradisum: et audivit arcana verba, quae non licet homini loqui».

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Augustine of Hippo had identified the «Man in Christ» as St. Paul in his commentary on this scriptural passage in the twelfth book of De Genesi ad litteram (The Literal Meaning of Genesis)7. Throughout the Middle Ages, Christian theologians took 2 Corinthians 12: 2-4 as the starting point for their discussions of the nature of mystical rapture, drawing on Augustine’s interpretation of this passage. St. Paul’s rapture into the third heaven was often portrayed as epitomizing the summit of a mystic’s contemplation of God, which surpassed even St. John’s spiritual vision, as described in the Apocalypse8. Bonaventure, who clearly ad-heres to this view, argues that St. Paul was transformed into Christ at the time of his rapture to the third heaven, and compares this transformation to the one that St. Francis underwent on Mt. La Verna9. The Franciscan theologian stresses the Poverello’s ardent love of the crucified Christ and asserts that, just as St. Paul loved Him to such an extent that he was caught up to the third heaven and transformed into Christ, so Francis’s love for the Crucified led to his reception of the marks of Christ’s Passion on his very body two years before his death10. Thus, as André Vauchez points out, the Itinerarium mentis in Deum presents the flesh of the stig-matized Francis «as the exterior manifestation of a mystical relationship between the human person and God and gave it an intelligibility in the order of the visible: the wounds (…) being the proof of the transforma-tive and assimilating power of love»11.

The Franciscan theologian also underscores Francis’s transformation into Christ at the time of his stigmatization in one of his sermons12. In this

7 Cfr. Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. J. H. Taylor, New York and Mahwah, NJ, Newman Press, 1982, vol. 2 (bk. 12, chap. 1), p. 179 and p. 300. n. 2.

8 D. Elliott, The Physiology of Rapture and Female Spirituality, in Medieval Theology and the Natural Body, ed. P. Biller – A. J. Minnis, Woodbridge, York Medieval Press, 1997, pp. 141-173: 143-144.

9 As noted in Frugoni, Francesco e l’invenzione delle stimmate, p. 179.10 Bonaventure [Bonaventura da Bagnoregio], Itinerarium mentis in Deo, ed. M.

Parodi – M. rossini, Milano, rizzoli, 1994, prologus, p. 84: «Via autem non est nisi per ardentissimum amorem Crucifixi, qui adeo Paulum ad tertium caelum raptum transfor-mavit in Christum, ut diceret: “Christo confixus sum cruci, vivo autem, iam non ego; vivit vero in me Christus”; qui etiam adeo mentem Francisci absorbuit, quod mens in carne patuit, dum sacratissima passionis stigmata in corpore suo ante mortem per bien-num deportavit».

11 Vauchez, Francis of Assisi, p. 222.12 On this sermon see C. Muessig, The Stigmata Debate in Theology and Art in the

Late Middle Ages, in The Authority of the Word: Reflecting on Image and Text in Northern Europe, 1400-1700, ed. C. Brusati – K. Enenkel – W. S. Melion, Leiden, Brill, 2012, pp. 481-504: 482-483.

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sermon, Bonaventure addresses a listener and asks him whether he wish-es to have the crucified Christ imprinted in his heart, and to transform himself into Christ so much, that he will burn with charity. Bonaventure adds that just as iron may be embossed with any form or image when heated to the point of melting, so a human heart burning with the love of Christ crucified is imprinted with it and the lover is transformed into Christ. This is precisely what happened to Francis, who was «completely transformed into the Crucified (totus transformatur in Crucifixum)». Ac-cording to Bonaventure, the sign of the cross that marked the body of the holy man signified the love that he had for Christ and thus, «from the heat of his love (ex illo ardore dilectionis)», Francis was completely transfigured into Him13.

Bonaventure’s characterization of Francis as a holy man whose pro-found desire to partake in the suffering of Jesus led to his transformation into Him influenced later writings about Francis’s reception of the stig-mata, such as the highly popular Meditaciones vite Christi (Meditations on the Life of Christ). The prologue of the Meditaciones, which in the late Middle Ages was erroneously attributed to Bonaventure, echoed this no-tion in the affirmation: «through the impression of the sacred stigmata, [Francis] was totally transformed into Christ»14. The efforts to promote Francis’s fame as an alter Christus culminated in the late fourteenth cen-tury with Bartolomeo of Pisa’s De conformitate vitae Beati Francisci ad vitam Domini Iesu (The Book of Conformities, 1385-1399). This work stressed the parallels between the life of Jesus – from the time of His birth until that of His Crucifixion – and that of the founder of the Fran-ciscan order. Such efforts to divinize St. Francis were clearly meant to exalt the members of the order he had founded above those belonging to all other religious orders15. Members of these other orders, and especially

13 Bonaventure, Sermons de diversis. Nouvelle édition critique, Paris, Editions Franciscaines, 1993, vol. 2, p. 783 (sermo 58): «Vis tu imprimere Christum crucifixum in corde tuo? In se ipsum vis tu transformare in quantum ardeas caritate? Sicut est de ferro, quando bene calet ita quod liquescit, tunc potest imprimi in illud quaelibet forma vel figura; sic in corde bene fervente per amorem ad Christum crucifixum imprimitur ipse Crucifixus vel crux Crucifixi, et totus transformatur in Crucifixum, sicut fecit beatus Franciscus…. Crux autem sive signum crucis impressum corpori eius significabat affec-tum quem ipse habebat ad Christum crucifixum; et tunc ex illo ardore dilectionis totus fuit transfiguratus in ipsum» (italics added).

14 Iohannis de Caulibus [Giovanni de’ Cauli], Meditaciones vite Christi olim S. Bonaventuro attributae, ed. M. Stallings-Taney, Turnhout, Brepols, 1997, p. 9: «per impressionem sacrorum stigmatum, fuit in eum totaliter transformatus».

15 Vauchez, Francis of Assisi, pp. 208-209.

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the Dominicans, initially tried to oppose the representation of St. Fran-cis as alter Christus. In the fourteenth century, when they realized that their efforts were to no avail, and that Francis’s stigmata had become a powerful dogma of the rival order, the Dominicans changed their tactics and began putting forth stigmatized individuals affiliated with their own order16.

2. Catherine of Siena’s Transformation into Christ.

In the Franciscan tradition, stigmata were reserved for the holy man Francis. Moreover, as Franciscan theologians strove to emphasize the visible dimension of the Poverello’s divine gifts, they were concurrently intent on discouraging devout women within their order from publi-cizing accounts of their paramystical experiences – that is, of physical phenomena attesting to their unmediated contacts with the divine. The saintly Poor Clare Colette of Corbie (1381-1447) did reportedly undergo ecstasies of the Passion, in which she relived the pains of Christ’s Cruci-fixion. In their writings, though, Colette’s Franciscan devotees portrayed these pains as attesting to her profound devotion to St. Francis’s stigmata rather than to her own assimilation to Jesus, and underplayed their physi-cal manifestations17. In the Dominican order, in contrast, stigmatization came to be regarded as a specifically female religious experience. Promi-nent Dominicans strove to promote the fame for sanctity of ecstatic women affiliated with their order who desired to imitate the suffering of the crucified Christ. The most famous of these was Catherine of Siena (1347-1380)18.

Catherine’s confessor and first hagiographer, the Dominican ray-mond of Capua (d. 1399), reported her reception of the stigmata in the vita known as the Legenda maior (Major Legend, written c. 1385-1395) of the Sienese mystic. Alluding to the Pauline remark in Galatians 6: 17 – which had previously been invoked in Franciscan discussions of St. Fran-

16 G. Klaniczay, On the Stigmatization of Saint Margaret of Hungary, in Medieval Christianity in Practice, ed. M. rubin, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2009, pp. 274-284: 279-282.

17 Cfr. D. Nimmo, Reform and Division in the Franciscan Order, roma, Istituto storico dei Cappuccini, 1995, pp. 460-467. On Colette’s somatic experiences see also C. W. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1987, pp. 137-139.

18 M. Lehmijoki-Gardner, Denial as Action: Penance and its Place in the Life of Catherine of Siena, in A Companion to Catherine of Siena, ed. C. Muessig – G. Ferzoco – B. Kienzle, Leiden, Brill, 2012, pp. 113-126: 121-122.

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cis’s reception of the stigmata – raymond asserted that Catherine once informed him, upon regaining her senses following one of her ecstasies, that she bore the marks of the Lord’s stigmata on her body19. According to raymond, Catherine had asked Jesus not to let her wounds show, and He conceded her this request, although the wounds of the stigmata con-tinued to cause Catherine incredible torments until her death in 1380. relying on the Legenda maior, Catherine’s Dominican devotees affirmed after her death that she had physically borne the marks of Christ’s Pas-sion on her body, even though these marks had remained invisible to others20. Thus, without rejecting the Franciscans’ claims that concrete physical signs should be regarded as the ultimate proofs for an individ-ual’s holiness, they nonetheless insisted that the veracity of such signs did not depend on their visibility. The marks could be ontologically real, and thus attest to a saintly person’s approximation to Christ, even if their presence could not be ascertained by ordinary humans.

raymond does not refer to Catherine’s transformation into Christ in his account of her reception of the stigmata, although elsewhere in the Legenda maior he claims to have once looked at the Sienese wom-an and witnessed her face change into the face of Jesus, a man with a short wheat-colored beard. The transfiguration of Catherine’s face oc-curred at a moment in which raymond himself was doubting the truth of her revelations, and in his vita of Catherine he describes this change as a means of validating the divine origins of her visionary experiences21. However, in the Libellus de Supplemento (Supplement c. 1418) of Tom-maso d’Antonio Caffarini (d. 1434) – which was meant to complement raymond’s Legenda maior – Catherine’s reception of the stigmata was explicitly described as a transformation, and unmistakably echoed earlier accounts of St. Francis’s stigmatization. Caffarini affirmed that Catherine should be revered as a saintly stigmatic, even though the marks of her

19 raymondo da Capua, Vita de la virgine admirabile Sancta Catherina da Siena del ordine de la penitentia de Sancto Dominico primo patre e patriarcha di frati predicatori, Milano, Johannes Antonius de Honate, 1489, fol. k 4r.

20 E. A. Moerer, The Visual Hagiography of a Stigmatic Saint: Drawings of Catherine of Siena in the «Libellus de Supplemento», «Gesta», XLIV (2005), 2, pp. 96-99.

21 For interesting discussions of raymond’s striking account of Catherine’s face changing into that of Christ see J. W. Coakley, Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators, New York, Columbia University Press, 2006, p. 186; J. Murray, One Flesh, Two Sexes, Three Genders?, in Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe: New Perspectives, ed. L. M. Bitel – F. Lifshitz, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008, pp. 34-51: 47.

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stigmata had been invisible22. Addressing the question of the cause and origin of her stigmatization, as compared to that of the Poor Man of As-sisi, Caffarini declared that through Catherine’s fervent desire for the Eu-charist she had been «drawn up into Christ and transformed so that she could become completely intoxicated in her suffering for Him (Christum taliter rapiebatur et transformabatur ut tota ebria ad patiendum pro ipso efficeretur)»23.

Both raymond of Capua and Caffarini, then, portrayed Catherine’s transfiguration into the male Christ. While their accounts were rather original, they were not entirely unprecedented in presenting a saintly woman who was united to Christ in body and soul, and became one and the same as Jesus. The legend of the early Christian saint Blandina (d. 177) recounted how, at the time of her martyrdom, this slave girl from Lyon was seen to those who looked at her body hanging in the form of a cross as the masculine figure of Jesus24. Nonetheless, it is instructive that Caffarini not only described Catherine’s transformation as a result of her ardent love for Jesus, but also equated it with the one that a famous holy man, namely St. Francis, underwent at the time of his own stigmatization. In the first decade of the fifteenth century, Caffarini and his Observant Dominican confreres continued to draw analogies between Francis’s re-ception of the stigmata and Catherine’s stigmatization, placing the latter at the core of their sermons25. Their efforts to undermine the uniqueness

22 See Muessig, The Stigmata Debate, pp. 492-496.23 Tommaso d’Antonio Caffarini, Libellus de supplemento legende prolixe virginis

beate Catherine de Senis, ed. I. Cavallini – I. Foralosso, roma, Edizioni Cateriniane, 1974, p. 179: «Item posset assignari alia differentia inter beatum Franciscum et beatam Catherinam, tam quantum ad originem et principium susceptionis stigmatum, quam etiam quantum ad finem. Quoniam quantum ad primum, causa et origo stigmatum in beato Francisco fuisse videtur representatio dominice passionis et inardescentia circa illam, intendendo ieiunio, solitudini, orationi et contemplationi; sed beata Catherina ultra inauditum a seculo ieiunium ac ferventissimum desiderium salutis animarum, quod ex precepto Dei per civitates et castella, uti sanctus Franciscus, prosequebatur, ita ad sacramentum dominicum miro modo et ultra quam dici possit afficiebatur, et hoc non solum tamquam ad memoriale dominice passionis, sed etiam pro quanto, ipsum sumendo, eius spiritus divino spiritui et eius corpus Christi corpori simul uniebatur, et ita in Christum taliter rapiebatur et transformabatur ut tota ebria ad patiendum pro ipso efficeretur».

24 On the gendered construction of St. Blandina and other early Christian female martyrs see L. Stephanie Cobb, Dying to Be Men: Gender and Language in Early Christian Martyr Texts, New York, Columbia University Press, 2008, pp. 113-116.

25 See C. Muessig, Catherine of Siena in Late Medieval Sermons, in A Companion to Catherine of Siena, pp. 207-213.

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of Francis as a stigmatized holy man initially proved unsuccessful; even though Catherine’s sanctity was officially approved in 1461, in the bull for her canonization Pope Pius II (1458-1464) did not mention her reception of the stigmata. This did not deter Catherine’s devotees from venerating her as a stigmatized saint, however. Indeed, according to the Dominican chronicler Girolamo Borselli (1432-1497), the canonization of Catherine of Siena was celebrated in the city of Bologna with a solemn procession, in which a painting that showed her bearing visible marks of the stigmata «in the same way in which St. Francis is depicted» was carried26.

Catherine was now a canonized saint, so the episode of her stigmati-zation, as described in her official hagiography, could not be dismissed out of hand. Nonetheless, Franciscan theologians insisted that whereas the authenticity of Francis’s stigmata marks was confirmed in three papal bulls issued by Gregory IX (1227-1241) – the pope who canonized the Poor Man of Assisi – as well as in subsequent papal documents, Pope Pius II made no mention of Catherine’s alleged stigmatization when he proclaimed her as a saint27. Emphasizing the lack of papal corroboration for the veracity of Catherine’s stigmata, they argued that even if Cath-erine had indeed felt the pains of Christ’s Crucifixion, her bodily confor-mity to Christ did not approximate that of the male St. Francis; unlike the latter, Catherine’s stigmatization could have occurred only in a vision or in a dream, and not in physical reality.

The ascension to the papal throne of the Franciscan Sixtus IV, in 1471, led to the promulgation of a series of bulls that officially forbade the depiction of Catherine bearing the stigmata. Although the papal proclamations did not deal with the ontological question of her stigma-tization, and referred only to its representation, Catherine’s devotees felt that the bulls also denied their very existence28. Thus, the Dominican chronicler Borselli accused Pope Sixtus of having «deprived Catherine

26 Girolamo Albertucci de’ Borselli, Cronica gestorum ac factorum memorabilium civitatis Bononie, Ms., Biblioteca Universitaria, Bologna, Cod. Lat. 1609, fol. 64v: «ymago eius in processione portata est cum stigmatibus, ut depingitur S. Franciscus». On Borselli see G. Petrella, L’officina del geografo. La «Descrittione di tutta Italia» di Leandro Alberti e gli studi geografico-antiquari tra Quattro e Cinquecento, Milano, Vita e Pensiero, 2004, pp. 36-42.

27 Cfr. C. Warr, Visualising Stigmata: Stigmatic Saints and Crises of Representation in Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy, «Studies in Church History», XLVII (2011), pp. 228-247: 230-232. On the papal bulls concerning the stigmatization of St. Francis see Davidson, Miracles of Bodily Transformation, pp. 456-457.

28 D. Giunta, La questione delle stimmate alle origini della iconografia cateriniana e la fortuna del tema nel corso dei secoli, in Con l’occhio e col lume. Atti del corso seminariale

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of her stigmata»29. Sixtus’s bulls aroused bitter criticism not only among Italian Dominicans, but also north of the Alps. In 1482, the Dominican archbishop Andreas Zamometic´ of the Krajina (d. 1484) listed the prom-ulgation of these bulls among his reasons for convoking an anti-papal Church council in Basel30.

3. Catherine of Siena and Lucia Brocadelli of Narni.

When Alexander VI became pope in 1492, the Dominicans bolstered the endeavors to change official Church policy towards Catherine. The Bolognese friar Girolamo Borselli played an important role in these at-tempts. In 1495, Borselli completed an account of the purported stig-matization of the Dominican saint Margaret of Hungary (d. 1270) who, as Gábor Klaniczay observes, had not been known as a stigmatic during her lifetime. Borselli’s text was aimed at proving the possibility of female stigmatization, thereby facilitating the ecclesiastical approbation of Cath-erine’s invisible marks31.

Just after completing his description of St. Margaret’s stigmatization, Borselli was assigned to preach a cycle of Lent sermons in rome, where he became acquainted with the Dominican tertiary Lucia Brocadelli of Narni (1476-1544), who in 1495 was already famous for her ecstatic visions32. When Borselli met her, Brocadelli informed him of a fright-

di studi su S. Caterina da Siena, ed. L. Trenti – B. Klange Addabbo, Siena, Cantagalli, 1999, pp. 319-347.

29 G. Borselli, Cronica magistrorum generalium Ordinis fratrum praedicatorum, Ms., Biblioteca Universitaria, Bologna, Cod. Lat. 1999, fol. 234r: «beatam Catherinam de Senis stigmatibus privavit».

30 J. Schlecht, Andrea Zamometic und der Basler Konzilsversuch vom jahre 1482, Paderborn, Schöningh, 1903, pp. 36-37. On Zamometiƒ’s life, see also Jürgen Petersohn, Kaiserlicher Gesandter und Kurienbischof: Andreas Jamometic am Hof Papst Sixtus’ IV. (1478-1481): Aufschlüsse aus neuen Quellen [Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Studien und Texte, 35], Hannover, Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 2004. The Dominican churchman was later accused of having impeded the official recognition of Catherine’s stigmata by getting the issue entangled with his call for the convocation of an anti-papal council: see P. Dinzelbacher, Santa o strega? Donne e devianza religiosa tra Medioevo ed età moderna, trans. P. Massardo, Genova, ECIG, 1999, p. 104.

31 G. Klaniczay, Le stigmate di santa Margherita d’Ungheria. Immagini e testi, «Iconographica», I (2002), pp. 16-31.

32 On Lucia Brocadelli see G. Zarri, Pietà e profezia alle corti padane. Le pie consiglie-re dei principi, in Il Rinascimento nelle corti padane. Società e cultura, ed. P. rossi, Bari, De Donato, 1977, pp. 201-237: 201-214; A. Prosperi, s.v. Brocadelli (Broccadelli), Lucia, in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, roma, Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1960-, XIV, pp. 381-383; G. Zarri, Le sante vive. Profezie di corte e devozione femminile tra ‘400 e

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ful vision in which Christ, all covered with blood, had predicted to her the divine punishments that were about to be inflicted upon the city of rome to castigate its sinful inhabitants33. Borselli described his encounter with the saintly visionary in his Cronica magistrorum generalium Ordinis fratrum praedicatorum (Chronicle of the Master Generals of the Order of Preachers, 1497)34.

Soon after Brocadelli’s encounter with Borselli, the Dominican Mas-ter General assigned the young visionary to reform the tertiaries’ house of San Tommaso in Viterbo. Her devotees believed that it was in this town, during Passion Week of 1496, that Jesus finally granted Brocadelli her wish of visibly bearing the marks of His stigmata. Borselli – who by that time was back in Bologna – described the event in his chronicle of the Dominican Master Generals shortly before he died in 149735.

Extant sources pertaining to Brocadelli’s reception of the stigmata note that she explicitly expressed her desire not only to experience the pains of Christ’s Crucifixion, but also to physically display the marks of His stigmata. The saintly tertiary evidently sought a type of stigmata that could serve as a confirmation for the authenticity of Catherine of Siena’s invisible stigmatization. Indeed, in the first inquisitorial examination of her wounds, on April 23, 1497, Brocadelli asserted that St. Catherine herself had pleaded with Jesus to make her (Brocadelli’s) wounds vis-ible, so that they could serve as a proof for the reality of Catherine’s own stigmatization36. That Brocadelli had met with Girolamo Borselli in person shortly before the stigmata marks appeared on her body was probably not insignificant. By the time the miraculous occurrence re-

’500, Torino, rosenberg & Sellier, 1990, pp. 96-97, 106-107; T. Herzig, The Rise and Fall of a Savonarolan Visionary: Lucia Brocadelli’s Contribution to the Piagnone Movement, «Archiv für reformationsgeschichte», XCV (2004), pp. 34-60; E. A. Matter – G. Zarri, Una mistica contestata. La Vita di Lucia da Narni (1476-1544) tra agiografia e autobiografia, roma, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2011.

33 Klaniczay, On the Stigmatization of Saint Margaret, pp. 282-283.34 Borselli, Cronica magistrorum generalium, fol. 260v. This passage, but not the one

describing Brocadelli’s stigmatization (see n. 35 below) is cited in Borselli, Chronica gesto-rum ac factorum memorabilium civitatis Bononiae ab urbe condita ad a. 1497, ed. A. Sorbelli, in Rerum Italicarum Scriptores XXIII, Città di Castello, Lapi, 1929, II, p. Xii, n. 1.

35 Borselli, Cronica magistrorum generalium, fol. 261r.36 See the copy of the notarial document certifying this examination in Archivio

San Domenico, Bologna, Sez. I, tit. 7790, titled Prova delle stigmate della B. Lucia da Narni, e di S. Cattarina da Siena: «De suis stigmatibus dixit [Lucia], et affirmavit inge-nue, quod Sancta Katherina Senensis precibus et orationibus obtinuit a domino nostro Ihesu Christo, ut stigmata ipsius Lucie essent visibilia et palpabilia, in fidem et testimo-nium stigmatum ipsius Sancte Katherine».

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portedly took place, Brocadelli was clearly aware of the Dominicans’ ongoing efforts to mitigate Sixtus IV’s proclamations concerning Cath-erine’s stigmatization.

More than any Dominican holy woman before her – including St. Catherine – Brocadelli seemed to approximate St. Francis in the degree of her conforming to Christ’s physical suffering on earth. Moreover, Brocadelli’s Dominican supporters presented her in their sermons as an alter Franciscus, thereby provoking sharp criticism. Thus, describing Brocadelli’s local following in Viterbo in February 1498, the skeptical jurist Felino Sandei (1431-1505) complained that her Dominican confes-sor promoted her fame as if «Christ had aroused another St. Francis», who bore His stigmata, in Viterbo37. Nonetheless, Brocadelli’s bleeding wounds also aroused the admiration of non-Dominican devotees, most famously of Duke Ercole I d’Este (1431-1505), who invited the young tertiary to settle in his ducal capital. The duke of Ferrara had to bribe the podestà of Viterbo and appeal to Pope Alexander VI before he could ensure Brocadelli’s departure from Viterbo in 1499, when she was finally smuggled through the Papal States to Ferrara38.

4. St. Paul, St. Francis, and Lucia Brocadelli.

After Brocadelli’s arrival in his duchy, Ercole had her marks inspected by a series of inquisitors, physicians, and high ecclesiastics, who all ascer-tained the authenticity of her bleeding wounds. The examinations of her stigmata were recorded in notarized documents whose texts were then included in several publications issued outside the Italian peninsula in 1501 and 150239. These publications cited the New Testament verse «I bear the stigmata of Lord Jesus Christ on my body», which had previ-

37 Felino Sandei’s letter to Duke Ercole d’Este of February 16, 1498, Ms., Archivio di Stato di Modena, Ser. Ambasciatori: roma, busta 8, fasc. 41:1, c. 40:2: «Christo havea suscitato un altro san Francesco con le proprie stigmate». On this letter see M. Folin, Finte stigmate, monache e ossa di morti. Sul «Buon uso della religione» in alcune lettere di Ercole I d’Este e Felino Sandei, «Archivio italiano per la storia della pietà», XI (1998), pp. 181-244: 187-194.

38 E. A. Matter, Prophetic Patronage as Repression: Lucia Brocadelli da Narni and Ercole d’Este, in Christendom and Its Discontents: Exclusion, Persecution, and Rebellion, 1000-1500, ed. S. L. Waugh – P. D. Diehl, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 168-176.

39 On the complex motivations for the publication and circulation of these texts across Europe see T. Herzig, «Christ Transformed into a Virgin Woman». Lucia Brocadelli, Heinrich Institoris, and the Defense of the Faith, roma, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2013.

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ously featured in discussions of the stigmatization of St. Francis, and later also in decriptions of St. Catherine’s reception of the stigmata.

In a pamphlet in praise of Brocadelli’s divine gifts that the Spanish inquisitor Antonio de la Peña (d. 1512) published in Seville in 1502, the Pauline verse appears on the title page, which shows a religious woman, identified as «Soror Lucia», bearing the marks of the stigmata40. In a polemical tract that the Dominican witch-hunter Heinrich Institoris (alias Kramer, d. c. 1505) first issued in the Moravian city of Olomouc in April 1501, he similarly cited the remark from Galatians 6: 17 in his discussion of Brocadelli’s stigmatization. Institoris further asserted that whereas St. Paul had borne the marks of the Lord on his body only metaphorically, in an invisible manner, Brocadelli displayed the visible, bleeding wounds of Christ’s stigmata on the side of her body, as well as on her hands and feet41.

Elsewhere in his book, Institoris assured his readers that Brocadelli’s stigmata marks were seen bleeding in a rhythmic pattern every Friday, the day commemorating Christ’s Crucifixion, when the pains that she felt were particularly strong42. Emphasizing the recurrent bleeding of her wounds, Institoris implied that the miracle of Brocadelli’s reception of the stigmata was not only more significant than St. Catherine’s stigmatiza-tion, but was also greater than the stigmatization of St. Francis. Although the latter had reputedly borne all of Christ’s wounds visibly on his body, he was not believed to have displayed periodic bleeding43. Brocadelli’s stigmata were not only visible like those that appeared on the body of St.

40 Transumptum litterarum reverendissimi domini Hypoliti cardenalis Sancte Lucie atque archiepiscopi Mediolanensis, de veritate sacrorum stygmatum Christifere virginis sororis Lucie de Narnia…, [ed. Antonio de la Peña], n. p., n. d. [Seville, Estanislao Polono, 1502]. On this pamphlet see F. J. Norton, A Descriptive Catalogue of Printing in Spain and Portugal, 1501-1520, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1978, pp. 278, 468-469; Herzig, «Christ Transformed into a Virgin Woman», pp. 242-244.

41 Heinrich Institoris (Kramer), Sancte Romane ecclesie fidei defensionis clippeum adversus Waldensium seu Pickardorum heresim, Olomouc, Konrad Baumgarten, 1501, fol. 19v: «De illa sanctissima virgine in Viterbiensi civitate primo, nunc autem Ferrarie degens nomine Lucia […] que stigmata nostri salvatoris in eius manibus et pedibus, similiter et in latere iugiter portat iuxta illud apostoli Ego stigmata domini nostri Ihesu Cristi iugiter porto in corpore meo, sed apostolus utique invisibiliter, hec autem visibili-ter» (italics added).

42 Ibidem, fols. 22r, 79v. On Institoris and his admiration for the mystical phenom-ena experienced by Italian holy women see Herzig, «Christ Transformed into a Virgin Woman», pp. 83-227.

43 recurrent bleeding was generally assumed in the premodern era to be a female prerogative. See Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, pp. 200-201.

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Francis; they were also seen bleeding just as the wounds on Christ’s body had been at the time of His Crucifixion, thereby attesting to the Domini-can tertiary’s greater proximity to Jesus.

In July 1502, the Ferrarese humanist and notary Bartolomeo Goggio (or Goggo, d. c. 1505) similarly suggested that Brocadelli’s stigmatization was more admirable than that of St. Francis, in the deed of gift that he drafted for her tertiaries’ house, Santa Caterina da Siena in Ferrara (Atto di donazione di Santa Caterina da Siena)44. Like Institoris, Goggio drew on St. Paul’s words in the epistle to the Galatians in his discussion of Bro-cadelli’s stigmata. The Ferrarese author then went on to suggest that the miracle of female stigmatization actually surpassed that of St. Francis’s reception of the stigmata, and could serve as the greatest proof for the truth of the Christian faith45.

Goggio’s exaltation of female stigmatization was doubtlessly a blatant one, but it is noteworthy that his Atto di donazione, which survives in several manuscripts in the Archivio Storico Diocesano and the Biblio-teca Comunale Ariostea in Ferrara, was never issued in print. Commis-sioned by Duke Ercole d’Este, the Atto was apparently aimed at Fer-rarese readership only46. Other texts written by Ferrarese literati about Brocadelli’s stigmata, on the other hand, were sent to Heinrich Institoris in Moravia, and were published in a pamphlet that he edited in Olomouc in September 150147. This pamphlet included a poem of one hundred and fifty-one verses, authored by an unnamed Ferrarese poet and titled Carmen theocasticon de Lucia Narniensis tercii habitus Cherubici Domi-nici virgine stygmifera (A Saintly-Godly Poem about the Stigmatic Virgin Lucia of Narni of the Third Order of the Seraphic Dominic). The Carmen,

44 On Goggio see Zarri, Pietà e profezia alle corti padane, pp. 201-202; W. L. Gundersheimer, Bartolommeo Goggio: A Feminist in Renaissance Ferrara, «renaissance Quarterly», XXXIII (Summer 1980), 2, pp. 175-200; Pamela Joseph Benson, The Invention of the Renaissance Woman: The Challenge of Female Independence in the Literature and Thought of Italy and England, University Park, PA, Penn State University Press, 1992, pp. 33-35, 56.

45 Bartolomeo Goggio, Istrumento di donazione, Rog. Bartolomeo Gogio, Ms., Archivio Storico Diocesano, Ferrara, Fondo Santa Caterina da Siena, busta 3/30, c. 5r: «[…] vulnera Jesu Christi, que Paulus suo in corpore patiebatur et stigmata, que Franciscus suo in corpore habebat, quodque forte mirabilius est mulierem a Deo iisdem stigmatibus insignitam, quod maxime profecto fidei Christiane argumentum est veritatis» (italics added).

46 See Herzig, Anti-Jewish Polemics and Female Stigmatization in Renaissance Ferrara, «Archivio italiano per la storia della pietà», XXV (2012), pp. 113-138.

47 For the complete text of this pamphlet see Herzig, «Christ Transformed into a Virgin Woman», pp. 293-320.

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written in dactylic hexameter, features lengthy monologues attributed to Brocadelli herself. It is the earliest text known to date to describe in de-tail Brocadelli’s rapturous visions just before and immediately after her reception of the stigmata48.

In the Carmen, Brocadelli is cited beseeching Jesus to grant her vis-ible wounds on the side of her body, as well as on her hands and on her feet. She mentions the precedents of two stigmatized individuals, telling Christ that she considers «the one that Assisi bore (quem tulit Asisium)» and «the one whom Siena dedicated to [Him] (quam tibi Sena dicavit)» – that is, St. Francis and St. Catherine of Siena – to have obtained true happiness49. The Carmen thus portrays St. Catherine as the female Do-minican counterpart of St. Francis, implying that her stigmata were in no way inferior to his. It also presents Brocadelli, who in the following verses of the poem is described being granted her wish and receiving the marks of the stigmata, as a second Dominican stigmatic, whose marks are com-parable not only to those of St. Catherine but also to those of St. Francis.

The Carmen’s narrator describes Brocadelli’s physical state at the time her fellow tertiaries found her just after her stigmatization, and then con-tinues to report her conversation with a certain bishop, who came to her bedside to question her about her mystical experiences50. replying to the bishop’s questions, Brocadelli declares that the phenomenon she has been asked to describe is beyond human expression. Even if she could recall the contents of her ecstatic rapture, she affirms, it is not permitted («licet») to report such things51. With this assertion, the Carmen clearly alludes to St. Paul’s rapture to the third heaven, where he heard things that it is not al-lowed («licet») for man to utter52. The Apostle’s rapture to the third heaven

48 For a detailed analysis of the Carmen see ibidem, pp. 191-227.49 Carmen theocasticon de Lucia Narniensis tercii habitus Cherubici Dominici virgine

stygmifera [sic], in Stigmifere virginis Lucie de Narnia aliarumque spiritualium persona-rum feminei sexus facta admiracione digna, [ed. Heinrich Institoris], Olomouc, Konrad Baumgarten, 1501 (unpaginated), ll. 61-65: «Quem tulit Asisium, vel quam tibi Sena dicavit,/ Hos ego felices, et gaudia vera parasse/ Censuerim. His tandem, o summi clemencia Dei,/ Me dare consortem et simili mercede beare/ Ne renuas. Ah, celestis dulcedo quid hoc est».

50 The bishop is not identified in the Carmen, but other sources record Brocadelli’s questioning by Tito Maulino, the bishop of Castro who resided in Viterbo and came to visit her shortly after news of her stigmatization began spreading in this town. See Matter – Zarri, Una mistica contestata, p. 76, n. 101.

51 Carmen theocasticon de Lucia Narniensis…, ll. 111-112: «Nam neque conmemini, neque si meminisse facultas/ Ista referre licet».

52 Cfr. 2 Cor. 12, 2-4: «Scio hominem in Christo (…) quoniam raptus est in paradi-sum: et audivit arcana verba, quae non licet homini loqui».

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has been associated with Francis’s reception of the stigmata ever since Bo-naventure explicitly linked St. Paul’s mystical experience to the one that occurred on Mt. La Verna in his Itinerarium mentis in Deum53. The allusion to St. Paul’s rapture in a poem about an aspiring female stigmatic belong-ing to the Dominican order therefore assumes an additional significance.

In the Carmen, Brocadelli goes on to exclaim that God had already prohibited talking about the things seen on Mt. Tabor, and that the one caught up to the third heaven had been warned not to speak about such things54. With the mention of Mt. Tabor, the poem calls to mind the scrip-tural scene of the Transfiguration, in which Christ’s humanity appeared transfigured by the radiance of His divinity55. Although the Gospels do not name the high mountain on which the Transfiguration took place, in later meditative literature such as the Meditaciones vite Christi the place of the Transfiguration was identified as Mt. Tabor56. Hence, the Carmen draws an analogy between what Brocadelli saw at the time of her stigma-tization and the experience of the disciples who had witnessed the Trans-figuration of Jesus. Brocadelli was not allowed to speak of her ecstatic vi-sion, just as John, Peter, and James had been prohibited by God to reveal what they had seen at the time of Christ’s Transfiguration.

Interestingly, in his Legenda maior of St. Francis (1263), Bonaventure describes the holy man being lifted up to a high mountain before his stig-matization – just as Christ had been at the time of His Transfiguration57. Mt. La Verna, where Francis was believed to have received his stigmata, subsequently became associated through figural and historical relations with Mt. Tabor58. In evoking the Pauline rapture to the third heaven as well as Christ’s Transfiguration on Mt. Tabor, the Carmen’s author evi-dently drew on Bonaventure’s writings about St. Francis. Associating Brocadelli’s miraculous stigmatization both with the Pauline rapture and with Francis’s reception of the stigmata on Mt. La Verna, the poem sug-

53 See n. 10 above.54 Carmen theocasticon de Lucia Narniensis…, ll. 120-123: «vetuitque Deus conspec-

ta referri/ Iam quecumque Thabor, quemque conspexerat olim/ Quem monet a celo vox horrida missa per auras,/ Et super assumptum vidit rota tercia celi».

55 Christ’s Transfiguration is described in Mt. 17, 1-9; Mc. 9, 1-9; Lc. 9, 28-36; Io. 1, 14; 2 Pt. 1, 16-18.

56 Iohannis de Caulibus, Meditaciones vite Christi, pp. 154-155.57 Bonaventure, Life of St. Francis, chap. 13, in The Soul’s Journey into God, the Tree

of Life, the Life of St. Francis, ed. and trans. E. I. Cousins, Mahwah, NJ, Paulist Press, 1978, pp. 303-304.

58 J. G. Demaray, Dante and the Book of the Cosmos, Philadelphia, The American Philosophical Society, 1987, pp. 27-30.

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gested that the stigmatization of the Dominican tertiary from Narni was not inferior in any way to the one attributed to the Poor Man of Assisi.

5. «Christ Transformed into a Virgin Woman».

If Bonaventure and subsequent Franciscan authors hailed the stigma-tized Francis as an alter Christus, then, how did the admirers of Lucia Brocadelli construe her relations to Christ? An answer to this question may be found in one of the other texts included in the pamphlet that Institoris issued in Olomouc59, namely in a letter that Cardinal Ippolito I d’Este (1479-1520), Duke Ercole’s son, wrote in praise of Brocadelli60. In the letter, which he drafted on July 24, 1501, Cardinal Ippolito attempted to construe the image of Brocadelli as a Christus redivivus. Thus, in the course of his eulogy of her bleedings marks, he exclaimed: «What am I saying? [That] with these holy wounds and admirable stigmata, which He suffered in His own body for the redemption of humanity, Jesus Christ was transformed into a virgin woman (Ipsum Christum Ihesum in virgine quadam transformatum)»61.

The wording in this passage patently recalls Bonaventure’s discussions of the stigmatization of St. Francis, who was «completely transformed» into the crucified Christ62. Cardinal Ippolito also alludes to the other

59 For the discrepancies between the extant manuscript copy of the cardinal’s origi-nal letter and the text that Heinrich Institoris published in Olomouc see Herzig, «Christ Transformed into a Virgin Woman», pp. 172-182, and see the text of the letter’s published version in ibidem, pp. 298-303.

60 On Ippolito d’Este see E. G. Gardner, Dukes and Poets in Ferrara: A Study in the Poetry, Religion, and Politics of the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries, London, Archibald Constable, 1904 (rept. 1968), pp. 336-337, 385-397, 405-418; L. Lockwood, Adrian Willaert and Cardinal Ippolito I d’Este: New light on Willaert’s Early Career in Italy, 1515-21, «Early Music History», V (1985), pp. 85-112; E. Guerra, L’educazione militare del cardinale Ippolito I d’Este, in Formare alle professioni. La cultura militare tra passato e presente, ed. M. Ferrari – F. Ledda, Milano, Franco Angeli, 2010, pp. 101-115.

61 See the formal copy of Cardinal Ippolito d’Este’s letter of July 24, 1501, Ms., Archivio Storico Diocesano, Ferrara, Fondo Santa Caterina da Siena, busta 3/25 (Processi della Beata Lucia da Narni): «Quid loquor? Ipsum Christum Iesum in virgine quadam transformatum, cum his sacris, que pro humani generis redemptione in proprio corpore passus est, vulneribus admirandisque stygmatibus».

62 In the sentence preceding the one quoted in n. 61 above, the cardinal affirms: «Quom immensa divine largitatis beneficia in dies erga humanum genus excrescant, unum potissimum nostris vidimus suscitatum temporibus, quo fidelium mentes in Dei optimi maximique amorem, devotionem cultumque excitari deberent, nec non sancte charitatis igne estuare, ac (ut magni utar Dionisii verbis) ex ipso dilectionis ardore extra proprios sen-sus poni, memoriam videlicet Passionis sacratissime Iesu Christi unigeniti filii Dei domini

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well-known thirteenth and fourteenth-century portrayals of Francis and Catherine of Siena as individuals who were transformed into Christ with their reception of the stigmata. 63 Like St. Francis and St. Catherine, Bro-cadelli was united to Jesus in body and soul, becoming one and the same as Christ. In Ippolito d’Este’s text, however, it is not the saintly individual who is being transformed into Jesus; rather, the Savior is the one being transformed, and He turns Himself into a live female virgin.

Cardinal Ippolito’s statement about Christ’s transformation into a virgin woman contrasted with the predominant late medieval notion that Jesus had been incarnated as a man, and not as a woman, because the male sex was the more honorable one. In the thirteenth century, Bonaventure argued that God ought not to assume the female sex, because it is not as perfect, or as excellent as the male sex64. This was also the argument used by later Fran-ciscan theologians who rejected the possibility of female stigmatization65.

Throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Dominican theolo-gians backed stigmatized holy women, yet they did not openly question the view that the greater dignity of the male sex rendered it the more fitting for Christ to have been incarnated only as a man, even though he had suffered equally for the salvation of both sexes. At the turn of the sixteenth century, on the other hand, at least two Dominican polemists were involved in the publication of Ippolito d’Este’s letter in praise of Brocadelli’s mystical gifts. The cardinal’s letter was published by the Dominican inquisitor Antonio de la Peña in Seville and in Valladolid in 150266, in addition to its inclusion in

nostri» (ibidem; italics added). This assertion similarly alludes to Bonaventure’s sermon about the stigmatization of St. Francis, in which the Franciscan theologian uses the term «ex illo ardore dilectionis» (Bonaventure, Sermons de diversis, vol. 2, p. 783).

63 For Francis, see the quote from Iohannis de Caulibus, Meditaciones vite Christi, in n. 14 above. For Catherine of Siena see the citation from Caffarini, Libellus de sup-plemento, in n. 23 above.

64 On the general agreement of most fourteenth and fifteenth-century theologians on this issue see J. Gibson, Could Christ Have Been Born a Woman? A Medieval Debate, «Journal of Feminist Studies in religion», VIII (Spring 1992), 1, pp. 65-82.

65 As the Franciscan polemist Samuele Cassini argued in De stigmatibus sacris Divi Francisci et quomodo impossibile est aliquam mulierem, licet sanctissimam, recipere stigmata, Pavia, Per Magister Bernardinus Baraldis, 1509 (unpaginated). See especially Cassini’s assertion: «caro virilis… eminentiam quamdam atque gradum, qui correspondeat eminen-tie rationis in domino nostro Iesu Christo inquantum erat homo, quam eminentiam dicere nullo modo potest neque signare caro muliebris (…) quamvis igitur caro virilis et muliebris non differant ratione quiditativa (…) sed sola (…) tanquam perfectum ab imperfecto».

66 Transumptum litterarum reverendissimi domini Hypoliti cardenalis Sancte Lucie atque archiepiscopi Mediolanensis, de veritate sacrorum stygmatum Christifere virginis sororis Lucie de Narnia … An edition of the pamphlet that De la Peña published in

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the pamphlet issued in Olomouc a year earlier by Heinrich Institoris, who is remembered today primarily as author of the influential demonological tract Malleus maleficarum (The Witches’ Hammer, c. 1486). Interestingly, in his misogynistic witch-hunting manual Institoris still reiterated the traditional view. In fact, he concluded his discussion of women’s greater propensity for witchcraft by thanking the Almighty for privileging the male sex and exclaiming that God, who had been born and had suffered on behalf of hu-mankind in the guise of a man, preserved men from the nefarious crimes of witches67. In the years following the completion of the Malleus maleficarum, though, Institoris visited the Italian peninsula and became increasingly im-pressed by the physical manifestations of women’s mystical gifts. After his encounter with Lucia Brocadelli in March 1500, the Dominican witch-hunt-er devoted considerable efforts to propragating the female stimatic’s fame for sanctity north of the Alps68. By the time he published Cardinal Ippolito’s letter in Olomouc in September 1501, Institoris had clearly rejected the idea that Christ was incarnated as a man because God privileged the male sex. Indeed, in publishing Ippolito d’Este’s letter, the Alsatian inquisitor – like his Castilian confrere Antonio de la Peña – facilitated the propagation of the notion that a live holy woman should be revered as a reincarnated Christ.

6. Lucia Brocadelli, Domenica Narducci, and Caterina de’ Ricci.

In 1501, the year in which Cardinal Ippolito wrote his letter, mention of Brocadelli’s stigmata was also made during the investigation of the Tuscan visionary Domenica Narducci of Paradiso (1473-1553) by the episcopal tri-bunal in Florence69. A few years later, Domenica’s confessor Francesco da

Seville was issued in Valladolid by the printer Diego de Gumiel (Norton, A Descriptive Catalogue of Printing, pp. 468-469). On the life and works of the fervent Dominican inquisitor Antonio de la Peña see A. Mortier, Histoire des maîtres généraux de l’ordre des frères prêcheurs, Paris, Picard, 1911, vol. 5, p. 96; Francesco renda, L’Inquisizione in Sicilia: I fatti, le persone, Palermo, Sellerio, 1997, pp. 27-33, 233; Guillermo Nieva Ocampo, La creación de la observancia regular en el convento de San Esteban de Salamanca durante el reinado de los Reyes Católicos, «Cuadernos de Historia de España», LXXX (December 2006), pp. 91-126: 95-100.

67 Institoris, Malleus maleficarum, ed. C. S. Mackay, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006, vol. 1, p. 292: «Et benedictus altissimus qui virilem speciem a tanto flagitio usque in presens sic preservat, in quo utique cum pro nobis nasci et pati voluit, ideo et ipsum privilegiavit».

68 On Institoris’s growing appreciation of female spirituality during the last decade of his life see Herzig, «Christ Transformed into a Virgin Woman», pp. 83-154.

69 On Domenica Narducci’s life and mystical experiences see A. Valerio, Domenica da Paradiso. Profezia e politica in una mistica del Rinascimento, Spoleto, Centro Italiano

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Castiglione (1466-1542), a canon of San Lorenzo in Florence, questioned her about this interrogation and recorded her answers in writing. Accord-ing to Francesco’s report, Domenica was asked why she did not have a fixed confessor like Suor Lucia of Viterbo (that is, Brocadelli), who at that time bore the marks of the stigmata70. According to Francesco, Domenica herself had received the stigmata in 1495, but she tried to keep her wounds covered with her clothes and shoes, and constantly begged Christ to render them invisible, because of her modesty71. Around 1501, Jesus finally agreed and removed the marks from her hands and feet. When questioned about her stigmata in that very year, Domenica responded by showing her hands and affirming that she merely had warts on her palms.

Domenica was eventually absolved of all the charges that had been brought against her this time (although in 1519 she was once again accused of improper religious conduct). In the first years of the sixteenth century she lived as a Dominican tertiary and attracted several clerical admirers, including Francesco da Castiglione. Francesco observed that even after the visible marks of her stigmata had become invisible, they used to reappear on Fridays, in the form of a red oval. The devout confessor added a sketch of Domenica’s hand to the written account in his vita. He also claimed to have witnessed one of her ecstasies of the Passion, which took place during Lent on Friday, March 16 in 1506 – the year in which Domenica turned thirty three, the same age as Jesus at the time of His Crucifixion. Francesco describes how Domenica lay down on the floor in the form of the Cross and was then rapt in spirit. In the midst of a vision of Christ being cruci-fied, she herself underwent the agony of His Passion72. Francesco captured the appearance of Domenica in the course of her ecstatic state in a drawing that showed her bearing the marks of the stigmaga, and noted in writing

di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 1992; I. Gagliardi, Sola con Dio. La missione di Domenica da Paradiso nella Firenze del primo Cinquecento, Firenze, Sismel, 2007.

70 Gagliardi, Sola con Dio, pp. 39-40. Brocadelli was often designated in Florentine sources as Suor Lucia da Viterbo (ibidem, p. 40, n. 86, and see T. Herzig, Savonarola’s Women: Visions and Reform in Renaissance Italy, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2008, p. 248, n. 58).

71 It is instructive that although Francesco was only introduced to Domenica in the early sixteenth century, and does not provide an exact date for her reception of the stig-mata, he makes it a point to present it as preceding the appearance of Lucia Brocadelli’s much publicized stigmatization in the spring of 1496. The admiring confessor was evi-dently aware of Brocadelli’s fame as an acclaimed stigmatic, and may have been trying to dispel suspicions that Suor Domenica was consciously trying to emulate her in order to become a revered holy woman herself.

72 M. Callahan, Suor Domenica da Paradiso as alter Christus: Portraits of a Renaissance Mystic, «Sixteenth Century Journal», XLIII (2012), 2, pp. 323-350: 329-330, 337-338.

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that this was the form in which she was lying down while – as she later told him – she was suffering the pains of the Crucifixion73.

Though Francesco’s portrayal of Domenica Narducci in this position was quite unusual, it was not unprecedented. Four years earlier, in 1502, a woodcut depicting the Dominican tertiary Stefana Quinzani (1457-1530) being crucified while undergoing an ecstasy of the Passion adorned the titlepage of a pamphlet that included a written description of her ecstatic rapture74. The pamphlet was published in faraway Strasburg, and there is no evidence indicating that Francesco da Castiglione ever saw its titlep-age75. Nonetheless, intensely visual written descriptions of Quinzani’s the-atrical reenactments of the Passion of Jesus circulated in manuscript form in the Italian peninsula since 1497. In 1501-1502, these accounts were in-corporated into several publications in praise of Lucia Brocadelli’s stig-matization, including the pamphlet that Heinrich Institoris published in Olomouc76. Narducci, who by 1501 was already well aware of Brocadelli’s paramystical experiences, most likely also knew of Quinzani’s weekly reliv-ing of Christ’s Passion by 1506, and so did her spiritual father77. Whether or not Francesco da Castiglione’s drawing of Narducci was inspired by descriptions of Quinzani’s ecstasies of the Passion, it differed from the Strasburg woodcut in that opposite to the figure of the holy woman un-dergoing a crucifixion Francesco depicted the figure of Christ crucified. Above the drawing of Jesus, Francesco noted in writing that it was based on Domenica’s report of what she had seen in her vision78.

In Francesco’s drawing, Domenica appears in the exact position in which Jesus is portrayed: her hands are raised above her head and her legs are crossed in an identical manner to His. As Meghan Cal-

73 As noted in the vita of Suor Domenica written by Francesco da Castiglione, conserved in the archive of the Convento della Crocetta in Florence and cited in r. Argenziano, Suor Domenica da Paradiso: L’iconografia del sepolcro di una mistica di primo Cinquecento, «Hagiographica», XVI (2009), pp. 317-339: 318: «Forma in qua Venerabilis Sponsa Christi iacebat in me conspiciente Passionis Domini cruciatus passa est die 16 martii anno 1506 in quadragesima».

74 Wunderbarlithe [sic] geschichten, die do geschehen synt von geystlichen wybs per-sonen in disen Joren, n.p., n.d. [Strasburg, Bartholomäus Kistler, 1502?], titlepage.

75 The woodcut is reproduced in Herzig, «Christ Transformed into a Virgin Woman», p. 287 (fig. 6). On its unique iconography see ibidem, pp. 239-241.

76 Ibidem, pp. 93-95, 182-183, 309-312.77 As suggested in Callahan, Suor Domenica da Paradiso, pp. 328-329. On the paral-

lels between the depiction of Suor Domenica’s ecstasy and the written accounts descri-bing Quinzani’s Passion ecstasies, see also ibidem, p. 336.

78 See Gagliardi, Sola con Dio, p. 91 and n. 189. Francesco’s drawing of Suor Domenica and Christ is reproduced in Callahan, Suor Domenica da Paradiso, p. 324.

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lahan has shown, the drawing clearly recalls the narration of St. Fran-cis’s reception of the stigmata in Tommaso of Celano’s Vita (Life of St. Francis, 1228), the earliest hagiography of Francis79. In Francesco da Castiglione’s drawing of 1506, the wounds in Narducci’s hands are portrayed as nails that point in the opposite direction from those of Jesus, indicating that although the female mystic approximated Christ, she was not his equal. Like Celano’s account of St. Francis’s recep-tion of the stigmata, Francesco portrayed Domenica as a «replica of Christ» and did not present her as a saintly individual who had been transformed into Jesus. Furthermore, during the first decade of the Cinquecento Francesco propagated neither images nor written ac-counts of Narducci’s stigmata and rapturous ecstasies beyond the walls of her religious community80.

At the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, lay and religious visitors flocked to Brocadelli’s tertiaries’ house in Ferrara to see the blood that used to flow out of her stigmata wounds on Fridays. Quinzani’s weekly ecstasies of the Passion likewise attracted curious spectators81. Conversely, Narducci’s reliving of the suffering of Christ’s Crucifixion seems to have been known only to her immediate circle of devotees, and did not become public knowledge82. That her admirers refrained from propagating her fame as a stigmatized holy woman reflected their awareness of her pre-carious position in republican Florence. Before the fall of the republic and the reestablishment of the Medicean regime in this city in 1512, Narducci could not count on the support of powerful princely patrons as did her northern Italian counterparts Brocadelli and Quinzani, who were backed by the duke of Ferrara and the marquises of Mantua respectively83.

The caution on the part of Narducci’s devotees was doubtlessly also related to the news of Brocadelli’s fall from grace in 1505. Following the death of her influential protector Duke Ercole in January 1501, Brocadel-li’s adversaries – who resented her active cultivation of devotion to the Dominican prophet Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498) – took advantage of the opposition to the Savonarolan stigmatic within her own commu-

79 On Celano’s account of St. Francis’s stigmatization in this early vita see Frugoni, Francesco e l’invenzione delle stimmate, esp. pp. 153-157.

80 Callahan, Suor Domenica da Paradiso, p. 336.81 See Zarri, Pietà e profezia alle corti padane, p. 217, nn. 60-61; M. Lehmijoki-

Gardner, Dominican Penitent Women, New York and Mahwah, NJ, Paulist Press, 2005, pp. 192-197; C. Warr, Performing the Passion: Strategies for Salvation in the Vita of Stefana Quinzani (d. 1530), «Studies in Church History», XLV (2009), pp. 218-227.

82 Callahan, Suor Domenica da Paradiso, pp. 335-336.83 Cfr. Herzig, Savonarola’s Women, p. 193.

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nity. They spread the rumor that her fellow tertiaries, peeping through a hole in the ceiling of her monastic cell, had seen Brocadelli wound-ing herself with a knife in order to procure the marks of her stigmata84. Though she was never officially brought to trial on charges of feigning sanctity, her enemies propagated news of the disappearance of the visible marks of her stigmata85. Francesco da Castiglione was indubitably aware of the severe reversal in Brocadelli’s fortunes, because he referred to her in his account of Narducci’s first interrogation as a Dominican tertiary who «at that time (eo tempore)» – that is, in 1501 – bore the stigmata. His wording implied that the stigmata marks on Brocadelli’s body were no longer visible when he was writing down the account of the interroga-tion, after becoming Narducci’s confessor in 150686.

In the first decades following Brocadelli’s dramatic downfall, her own faithful supporters refrained from publicly hailing her as an incarnated Christ. As Narducci’s case indicates, male promoters of other Italian female mystics, such as Francesco da Castiglione, likewise avoided dis-seminating texts or images that stressed these women’s approximation to the crucified Christ. Nevertheless, the notion that Jesus could appear to faithful Christians in the bodily form of a stigmatized woman did not quite disappear. It surfaced in a letter written by the Dominican Suor Maria Gabriella Mascalzoni (d. 1562), in which she described the ecstatic rapture of her fellow nun Caterina de’ ricci (1522-1590) on a certain Wednesday in December 154487.

Caterina de’ ricci, who in 1544 was believed to be bearing the stigma-ta – that in her case was confined to a side wound, which subsequently became invisible (in 1554) – was also famous for her periodic reenact-ments of Christ’s Passion88. During these ecstatic raptures, she was some-

84 Giacomo Marcianese, Narratione della nascità, vita e morte della B. Lucia da Narni dell’ordine di San Domenico, Ferrara, Per Gioseffo Gironi, 1640, pp. 205-206; Domenico Ponsi, Vita della beata Lucia vergine di Narni, roma, Per Francesco Gonzaga, 1711.

85 On the complex reasons for the severe reversal in Brocadelli’s fortunes see Herzig, Savonarola’s Women, pp. 127-142.

86 Francesco’s account is cited in Gagliardi, Sola con Dio, pp. 39-40. See especially his assertion: «[I]tem quare cuicumque sacerdoti confiteretur quod eam certum patrem spiritualem habere deceat, exemplo cuiusdam sororis Lucie que eo tempore Viterbii habere stigmata ferebatur » (italics added).

87 The letter is published in A. Scattigno, Sposa di Cristo. Mistica e comunità nei «Ratti» di Caterina de’ Ricci, roma, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2011, pp. 247-249. For the letter’s extant manuscript copies see ibidem, p. 36, n. 76.

88 As Anna Scattigno observes, Caterina’s escstasies of the Passion were reminiscent of Stefana Quinzani’s theatrical reenactments (ibidem, p. 54, n. 69).

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times heard speaking to her fellow nuns as if she were Jesus himself. Suor Maria asserts that she initially doubted the authenticity of the things that Caterina uttered «in the person of Jesus (in persona di Iesu)»89. As she later reported, though, Caterina was once rapt in spirit, and then asked Suor Maria who she believed her to be: Suor Caterina or Jesus. When Maria responded that her interlocutor was Jesus, and reiterated this af-firmation three times, she looked at Caterina’s face and saw, instead, the face of Jesus90.

Suor Maria’s account of how the face of the stigmatized Caterina de’ ricci transformed into the face of Christ clearly reverberates raymond of Capua’s narration of a similar experience. As noted earlier, raymond recounts how, while he was doubting the veracity of Catherine of Siena’s revelations, he once looked at the Sienese mystic and saw her face change into the face of Jesus91. Like raymond’s report, Suor Maria’s letter advo-cated the radical notion that a pious woman could become one with the Savior and, as a result of her complete identification with the suffering of Jesus, was transformed into the male Christ. Pointing to the similarities between Catherine of Siena’s mystical gifts and those enjoyed by Caterina de’ ricci, the letter was therefore subsequently cited by the nuns who were questioned about Caterina’s saintliness in the course of her canon-ization process92.

On November 15, 1544, only a few weeks before Suor Maria re-corded her testimony of the transfiguration of Caterina de’ ricci’s face, the downcast stigmatic Lucia Brocadelli passed away. At the time of her death, a visible wound was discovered on the side of her body. Broc-adelli’s Dominican supporters interpreted this visible mark as a proof that she had been a genuine stigmatic all along93. Moreover, Savonarolan Dominicans such as Serafino razzi stressed Brocadelli’s spiritual affinity with Caterina de’ ricci, and argued that the latter «began to shine on earth precisely when the Blessed Lucia was taken from it, in order to be

89 Cited in ibidem, p. 36.90 Suor Maria Gabriella Mascalzoni’s letter, published in Scattigno, Sposa di Cristo,

pp. 247-249: «Sendo io suor Maria Gabriella Mascalzoni molto anghustiata circa le cose della sposa di Yhesu stata circa 3 anni (…) suor Caterina de’ ricci (…) disse: “Chi credi tu ch’io sia, suor Caterina o Gesu?” Et io dissi piangendo: “Gesu” (…). Et in questo modo fece 3 volte (…). Et vedevo la sua faccia tanto bella, che con lingua nol potrei narrare. Non era la faccia di suor Caterina, ma di Yhesu, et l’ultima volta mi appoggiò al costato tanto sodo, che certo credetti morir quivi (…) et lei disse: “Et Gesu è stato”».

91 See n. 21 above.92 See Scattigno, Sposa di Cristo, p. 112.93 Cfr. Marcianese, Narratione della nascità, p. 212; Ponsi, Vita della beata Lucia, p. 158.

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placed in Heaven»94. Just as Brocadelli drew inspiration from Catherine of Siena and was probably encouraged by her supporters to provide a visible confirmation for her contested stigmata, so too the emergence of Caterina de’ ricci as a Dominican stigmatic, whose fellow nun saw her being transformed into Christ, was related to the attempts to rehabilitate Brocadelli’s saintly reputation.

The Dominicans labored to promote Brocadelli’s fame as a woman whose stigmatization was in no way inferior to that of the male St. Fran-cis throughout the post-Tridentine era. In 1616, Giacomo Marcianese published the first full-length hagiography of the Dominican from Narni, and his vita of Brocadelli was issued again in 1640. Marcianese’s book included the texts of some of the early sixteenth-century documents at-testing to the authenticity of Brocadelli’s stigmatization, published in the original Latin but also, for the first time, in Italian translation. 95 One of these documents was Ippolito d’Este’s letter of 1501, which had previ-ously been published in Latin in Olomouc, Seville, and Valladolid, but not in the Italian peninsula. The full text of the cardinal’s letter was sub-sequently also published, in Latin, in Domenico Ponsi’s hagiography of Lucia Brocadelli in 1711, and in the memoriale presented to the Sacred Congregation of rites in 172896.

7. Conclusion.

The notion that a holy woman could be transformed into Christ just as St. Francis was transformed into Him on Mt. La Verna evolved only grad-ually in the late Middle Ages, and was inextricably linked to the Domin-ican-Franciscan rivalry. raymond of Capua, who noted that Catherine’s stigmata marks were invisible – thereby distinguishing them from St. Francis’s visible wounds – nonetheless described her transformation into Christ elsewhere in his Legenda maior. Throughout the fifteenth century,

94 Serafino razzi, La vita della reverenda serva di Dio, la madre Suor Caterina de’ Ricci, monaca del venerabile monastero di S. Vincenzio di Prato, Lucca, Per Vincentio Busdraghi, 1594, p. 173: «nostra carissima madre, la quale apunto incominciò a risplen-dere in terra, quando la Beata Lucia ne fù levata, per transferirla in Cielo».

95 Marcianese, Narratione della nascità, pp. 179-185. On Marcianese’s hagiography see Matter – Zarri, Una mistica contestata, pp. XXiii-XXV.

96 Cfr. Ponsi, Vita della beata Lucia, pp. 210-213; Sacra rituum congregatione Em.o, & Rm.o D. Cardinali Fini ferrarien. concessionis officii, & missae in honorem Beatae Luciae de Narnia ordinis Praedicatorum memoriale, roma, Typis reverendae Camerae Apostolicae, 1728, pp. 9-10. Strikingly, the Carmen theocasticon was never reprinted, and was mentioned neither in the documents from Brocadelli’s beatification procedure, nor in her official hagiographies.

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Dominican friars from Tommaso Caffarini to Girolamo Borselli hailed Catherine as a genuine stigmatic and hence as St. Francis’s equivalent. Eventually, the bloody marks of Lucia Brocadelli came to be regarded as a visible confirmation for the authenticity of Catherine’s stigmatization, and Brocadelli herself was lauded as Francis’s Dominican counterpart and as an alter Christus, notwithstanding her gender. Moreover, it was now suggested – for the first time – that a saintly woman’s reception of the stigmata was a more significant miracle than a holy man’s stigmatiza-tion, and that the periodical bleeding of her visible wounds rendered Brocadelli’s bodily conformity to Christ’s suffering on earth greater than St. Francis’s.

At the turn of the sixteenth century, the Dominican inquisitors Hein-rich Institoris and Antonio de la Peña repudiated the traditional view that Christ could only have been incarnated as a man, and publicized Ippolito d’Este’s letter, which argued that Christ transformed Himself into a woman with the miracle of Brocadelli’s stigmatization. The fascina-tion with female stigmatics who approximated Christ (like Narducci), or were seen being transformed into Him (like Caterina de’ ricci), persisted throughout the sixteenth century. Ultimately, the Dominicans’ relent-less efforts to obtain ecclesiastical recognition for Brocadelli’s sanctity ensured the continued propagation of Cardinal Ippolito’s radical notion – that Christ could reveal Himself to Christian believers by means of His transformation into a stigmatized woman – well into the eighteenth century.

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Stigmatized Holy Women as Female Christs

This article examines the attempts to promote female stigmatics from the four-teenth to the sixteenth century, and delineates the ways in which these chal-lenged deeply-entrenched theological presumptions. In response to the claims that St. Francis (d. 1226) had been transformed into Christ at the time of His stigmatization, it argues, the supporters of Italian Dominican women mystics hailed them as incarnated female Christs, and even proposed that the miracle of their stigmatization surpassed that of the reception of the stigmata by the holy man St. Francis.