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

$: \"The Creation of A Franciscan Lay Saint: Margaret of Cortona and Her Legenda\"$
THE CREATION OF A FRANCISCAN LAYSAINT: MARGARET OF CORTONA AND

HER LEGENDA*

Margaret of Cortona’s arrival in the city that would, within ageneration of her death in 1297, celebrate her as its patron saintmust have been the talk of the town. Margaret was an unmarriedlaywoman who, after living for years as the concubine of aMontepulciano nobleman, came to Cortona with herillegitimate son around 1272 seeking protection and forgivenessafter the death of her lover left her homeless. Within a few years ofher arrival in the city, Margaret had asked the CortoneseFranciscans to allow her to wear their penitential habit, adecision that would not only mark her new dedication to apenitential life but also offer her an association with a religiousorder on the rise in the city.1 Although the friars were at firstsceptical — Margaret’s beauty and youth led them to question hercommitment — in 1277 they eventually relented and allowed her towear a habit that would mark her as a Franciscan lay penitent.2

During the years she spent in Cortona, Margaret dedicatedherself to a rigorous and increasingly dramatic religious

* I am grateful for the immensely valuable comments I received from CarolineWalker Bynum, Paula Findlen, Emily Graham, Hillary Miller, Maureen Miller,Jeffrey Miner, Ellen Wurtzel, and the members of Stanford’s Theoretical Perspectiveson the Middle Ages working group.

1 For a history of the Franciscans in Cortona, see Giuseppina Inga, ‘Gliinsediamenti mendicanti a Cortona’, Storia della citta: rivista internazionale di storiaurbana e territoriale, ix (1978), 44–55; and Fortunato Iozzelli, ‘I francescani ad Arezzoe a Cortona nel duecento’, in La prescenza francescana nella Toscana del ‘200: Sabatifrancescani, 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 GerardMeersseman (ed.), Dossier de l’ordre de la penitence au XIIIe siecle (SpicilegiumFriburgense, vii, Fribourg, 1961); Giovanna Casagrande, Religiosita penitenziale ecitta al tempo dei comuni (Bibliotheca Seraphico-Capuccina, xlviii, Rome, 1995); andthe essays collected in Mariano D’Alatri (ed.), Il movimento francescano della penitenzanella societa medioevale, Atti del 38 Convegno di Studi Francescani, Padua, 1979(Rome, 1980).

2 While there has been some uncertainty whether Margaret became a Franciscanpenitent in 1277 or 1275, Iozzelli has convincingly argued that 1277 is most likely to bethe correct date; see Iunctae Bevegnatis, Legenda de vita et miraculis beatae Margaritaede 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) � The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2015

doi:10.1093/pastj/gtv023

by guest on August 13, 2015

http://past.oxfordjournals.org/D

ownloaded from

http://past.oxfordjournals.org/

programme that she hoped would make up for her sinful past andbring her closer to Christ. The Franciscans’ early misgivingsabout her past shame and present transformation remained,however. They eventually denounced her at a provincialmeeting as delusional and a fraud, after which she began todistance herself from the order she had once been so eager tojoin. She moved from the cell attached to the church of SanFrancesco in the centre of Cortona, where she had been living,to the abandoned church of San Basilio, nestled at the top of asteep hill half a mile above the city. At some point during her timeat San Basilio, the Franciscans sent Giunta Bevegnati, Margaret’sconfessor and the author of the Legenda de vita et miraculis BeataeMargaritae de Cortona, to their Siena house, where he wouldspend seven years.3 While Giunta was in Siena, Ser Badia, asecular cleric, took over as Margaret’s primary confessor. Inaddition to Margaret and Ser Badia, a community of laypenitents gathered at San Basilio to help her rebuild the churchand eventually to manage the many devotees who would flock toher tomb.

Margaret’s desire to form an association with the Franciscanorder is evidence of a broader tendency among the late medievallaity to construct their religious lives in conjunction with theburgeoning mendicant orders. A connection to the Franciscansoffered a lay penitent such as Margaret both prestige andlegitimation. But the history of such relationships between laypenitents and their mendicant guardians remains unwritten.While Herbert Grundmann’s study of late medieval religiousmovements first alerted modern scholars to the complexity aswell as the acrimony in the associations between themendicants and their female counterparts, that pioneering workdid not investigate the relationships forged between friars and themen and women who retained their lay status.4 As a result,

3 Legenda. Thomas Renna shared with me an early draft of his translation of theLegenda: 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 myown.

4 Herbert Grundmann, Religious Movements in the Middle Ages: The Historical Linksbetween Heresy, the Mendicant Orders, and the Women’s Religious Movement in the Twelfthand Thirteenth Century, with the Historical Foundations of German Mysticism, trans.Steven Rowan (Notre Dame, Ind.,1995), originally published as ReligioseBewegungen im Mittelalter (Berlin, 1935).

58 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 228



ownloaded from


scholars after Grundmann have explored the explosion of layreligious enthusiasm in late medieval cities in a manner thatlargelyassumes the friars supportedand fosteredsuchamovement.5

The dramatic unravelling of Margaret of Cortona’srelationship with her Franciscan guardians argues otherwise.The following study of Margaret’s early cult challengesscholars’ assumption that the mendicants were eager mediatorsof the surge of late medieval, urban, lay religious life. By firstpointing out the tensions and conflicts that so dominatedMargaret’s experience as a Franciscan penitent — issues thatsince the time of Margaret’s canonization in the eighteenthcentury scholars have either misread, de-emphasized, or missedaltogether — and then looking at broader concerns about friarsassociating with lay penitents voiced in the mid thirteenth-century Franciscan text Determinations of Questions Concerningthe Rule, this study will argue that the mendicants sometimeshampered 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 laterMiddle Ages] was a logical and necessary outcome of therevolution in progress’.7 That revolution increasingly saw thepath towards an ideal Christian life not within the monasterybut instead in the secular world. By the end of the twelfthcentury, European Christians were looking to itinerantpreachers instead of monks as most exemplifying the lifedescribed in the gospels.8 This article’s exploration of

5 See, for example, Andre Vauchez, The Laity in the Middle Ages: Religious Beliefs andDevotional Practices, ed. Daniel E. Bornstein, trans. Margery J. Schneider (NotreDame, Ind., 1993); Lester K. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy inMedieval Europe (Ithaca, 1978); and Augustine Thompson, Cities of God: TheReligion of the Italian Communes, 1125–1325 (University Park, Pa., 2005), 4.Although Thompson aims to highlight lay religion and writes that he has ‘chosen tokeep the Franciscans on the sidelines and so let the piety that produced Francis speakfor itself ’, his valuable work still assumes a harmony between Franciscan and layinterests.

6 (Pseudo)-Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, Determinationes quaestionum circa regulamfratrum minorum, in Bonaventurae Opera Omnia, VIII (Quaracchi, 1923), 327–74.

7 M.-D. Chenu, Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century: Essays on NewTheological Perspectives in the Latin West, ed. and trans. Jerome Taylor and Lester K.Little (Toronto, 1997) (originally published as La Theologie au douzieme siecle (Paris,1957)), 219.

8 Chenu, Nature, Man and Society, 214.

THE CREATION OF A FRANCISCAN LAY SAINT 59



ownloaded from


Margaret’s difficulties with her Franciscan guardians, as well asthe contention in the Determinations that such difficulties were aninevitable outcome of Franciscans’ association with lay penitents,brings into focus a key tension and irony born from that layrevolution: at the same time as a vita apostolica was increasinglyunderstood to be found in the lay world, the church wasarticulating its authority by distinguishing and separating thereligious from the secular. No example encapsulates this ironymore clearly than the early history of the Franciscan order.While Francis of Assisi’s uncanny embrace of the apostolic lifemade him an exemplar of a new understanding of the vitaapostolica, the church’s requirement that he and his FriarsMinor become clerics complicated the form and function of thenew religious life they represented: if friars were priests, what hadbecome of that lay revolution?9

In the Legenda’s first chapter, Giunta describes Margaret ashaving asked the Cortonese friars in 1277 to allow her to join‘the third order of blessed Francis’.10 Although throughout thethirteenth century several Franciscans refer to a ‘Third Order’,the order’s lay wing did not take institutional shape until1289.11 That was the year when Pope Nicholas IV’s bull,Supra montem, called for all lay penitents to be placed underFranciscan guardianship and outlined a set of guidelines (or arule) for those penitents to follow.12 Giunta’s use of ananachronistic term to describe Margaret’s 1277 associationwith the friars seems likely to have been aimed at bolsteringthe argument he makes throughout the text that she was aworthy candidate for his order to embrace: its ‘third light’.

9 Neslihan Senocak, The Poor and The Perfect: The Rise of Learning in the FranciscanOrder, 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 distoria francescana (Torino, 1997), 237–55; Heribert Roggen, ‘Les Relations dupremier ordre franciscain avec le tiers-ordre au XIIIe siecle’, in O. Schmucki (ed.),L’Ordine della penitenza di San Francesco d’Assisi nel secolo XIII, Atti del 18Convegno diStudi 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 unaregola, (Rome, 1988).

12 The bull outlined a set of rules and regulations for the lay penitential life that weredrawn largely from the 1221 Memoriale propositi believed by scholars to have been thework of Cardinal Ugolino dei Conti Segni (Gregory IX). See Pazzelli and Temperini(eds.), La ‘Supra montem’di Niccolo IV.




ownloaded from


But we can also see in Giunta’s designation an attempt toneutralize an inherently contentious relationship by placing itwithin an institutional and hierarchical structure. While thisarticle will make clear that the Franciscans’ suspicion andultimate rejection of Margaret was a result of the perfectanxiety-inducing storm created by her gender as well as herpast and present behaviour — she was, after all, both anunattached woman with a scandalous sexual past and avisionary claiming direct access to Christ — it will also arguethat it is within this one particularly difficult relationship aswell as within the more general concerns voiced by theauthor of the Determinations that we can see how at oddsunderstandings of the vita apostolica were with an expandinginstitutional church in the later Middle Ages. To be a laypenitent was to demonstrate that a rigorous religious lifecould be crafted independently of the church. Whenpenitents such as Margaret turn in the thirteenth century tothe mendicants, the most popular new representatives of thechurch’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 hasencouraged scholars to sidestep both the full complexity of theLegenda and the relationships it chronicles, this article will turn tolook at how a close reading of the Legenda argues both for a newdate of composition and for how pervasive the Franciscans’doubts were towards Margaret, even after her death. It will thenturn to consider how the mid thirteenth-century Franciscan text,the Determinations, suggests that such misgivings about laypenitents were widespread within the order. Finally, it willreturn to the Legenda in order to consider how passagesprobably produced by Margaret’s confessor at San Basilio, thesecular cleric Ser Badia, unambiguously celebrate Margaret’sspiritual gifts and may have inspired Giunta to revise theLegenda in the hope of convincing the many friars who hadmaintained their doubts and suspicions that she was not onlyworthy of veneration but was also the order’s ‘third light’. Thisessay will end by looking at how in the late fourteenth century, theorder itself embarked upon a larger project of historicalrevisionism when it first produced lists of so-called ‘ThirdOrder’ saints.




ownloaded from


I

READING AND DATING THE LEGENDA

Our knowledge of Margaret’s life comes almost exclusively fromGiunta Bevegnati’s Legenda, which was completed in 1308.Giunta divides the text into ten chapters, each of which focuseson a particular virtue that Margaret perfected. In his prologue, hewrites that he had been preoccupied and did not have the time toarrange the text properly.13 He asks his reader to reorder materialif anything ‘seems out of place’.14 His admission is not simply anexpression of humility but an accurate description. While the firsttwo chapters appear to give a chronological account of Margaret’sfirst years as a Franciscan penitent, the events related in the rest ofthe chapters follow no clear sequence.15 In a ‘Testimony ofAuthenticity’, written by Giunta and appended to a list of theLegenda’s contents in the earliest of the three surviving medievalmanuscripts, we learn that Friar Giovanni da Castiglione, the‘Inquisitor of the depraved heretics’ for provincial Tuscany, hadasked Giunta to compile the text.16 While Giunta’s identificationof Giovanni’s title does not indicate that Margaret was everformally considered a heretic, the suspicion and concern itembodied would also be written into the Legenda.17

13 Legenda, ‘Prologus’.14 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 accordingto 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 avision on a particular feast day, but he does not provide enough information to connectthat day to a specific year. Joanna Cannon and Andre Vauchez have suggested that theLegenda’s chaotic and non-linear style suggests it is a series of working notes ratherthan a polished piece of hagiography; see Joanna Cannon and Andre Vauchez,Margherita of Cortona and the Lorenzetti: Sienese Art and the Cult of a Holy Woman inMedieval Tuscany (University Park, Pa., 1999), 156.

16Archivio del Convento di S. Margherita, Cortona, Codex 61. Also found inLegenda, ‘Appendix’. Only three medieval manuscripts of the Legenda survive. Allwere written in the fourteenth century and all remain in Cortona. On themanuscript history of the Legenda, see Fortunato Iozzelli, ‘Introduzione’, inLegenda, 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, andthat on 15 February 1308, in the Cortona palazzo of Lord Uguccio dei Casali, Orsinigave the text his approval.

17 By the mid thirteenth century, responsibility for checking lay penitents for signsof heresy had shifted from bishops to the friars; see Iozzelli, ‘Introduzione’, in Legenda,9, and 66–9; Mariano D’Alatri, ‘Genesi della regola di Niccolo IV: aspetti storici’, inPazzelli and Temperini (eds.), La ‘Supra montem’di Niccolo IV, 93–107.




ownloaded from


But such suspicion is not what a reader first notices about theLegenda. Throughout the text, Giunta makes clear thatMargaret’s identity as an ideal penitent and model member ofthe laity stemmed in no small part from her connection to theFranciscans: the friars’ guidance and example allowed her tobecome, as Christ calls her, ‘the third light’ given to theFranciscan order, following Saints Francis and Clare. While thetext’s length (nearly three hundred pages in a recent edition)18

and Giunta’s efforts to have its contents approved by Romesuggest that the Franciscans dedicated significant time andresources to celebrating Margaret, in the generation after herdeath, it was the civic government of Cortona — the commune— and not the Franciscans, which most vigorously advocated forher sanctity. In 1325, Cortona identified Margaret as a saint in itsfirst set of civic statutes and made provisions for the city to pay forthe rector of San Basilio (where Margaret’s body lay) to travel toAvignon in the hope of attaining her canonization by thechurch.19 Although she would not be canonized until the earlyeighteenth century, in the fourteenth century San Basilio becamea popular pilgrimage site as news of the miracles taking place ather tomb and elsewhere spread.20 By the late 1330s, this once-ruined church had been extensively rebuilt and was referred to asSanta Margherita.21 A painted vita-panel, a marble funerarymonument, and the Sienese painters Ambrogio and PietroLorenzetti’s (now destroyed) fresco cycle surroundedMargaret’s tomb, all testaments to her thriving cult.22 Thegrowth of that cult was boosted by indulgences that both thebishops of Arezzo and Chiusi, and the papal legates Niccolo da

18 I am referring here to Iozzelli’s edition of the Legenda.19 Florence, Archivio di Stato, ‘Statuti comunita soggette’, 279 ff., 95, 123, 140v–

141v; these statutes, which mention Margaret’s feast day, have been transcribed byVauchez 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 toCortona that culminated in Margaret’s 1728 canonization. One set of thesewatercolours was inserted into Margaret’s canonization proceedings; see Vatican,Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Riti, Proc. 552. For Joanna Cannon’s study of thesewatercolour copies and other visual sources produced in conjunction withMargaret’s cult at San Basilio as well as her attribution to the Lorenzetti brothers,see Cannon and Vauchez, Margherita of Cortona and the Lorenzetti.




ownloaded from


Prato and Napoleone Orsini, offered to those who visited therebuilt church — indulgences that curiously make no mentionof Margaret’s Franciscan guardians.23 In the initial excitementsurrounding her death, the Franciscans are conspicuously absent.

If we turn to consider a timeline constructed by the eighteenth-century scholar and priest Lodovico Bargigli da Pelago, we cansee the genesis of modern scholars’ approach to Margaret’s earlycult. Prompted by Margaret’s 1728 canonization, Bargigli daPelago produced a history of Margaret’s San Basilio sanctuaryand its growth into a major pilgrimage site as well as a copiouslyannotated edition of the Legenda.24 In his notes, Bargigli da Pelagoproposed that the Franciscans condemned Margaret in 1288,appointed Giunta to be her primary confessor in 1289 uponGiovanni da Castiglione’s death, and finally moved the friar tothe order’s Siena house in 1290. Bargigli da Pelago also arguedthat Giunta returned to Cortona shortly before Margaret’s deathon 22 February 1297.25 This sequence of dates has encouragedscholars to assume that Giunta wrote the Legenda, with the fullsupport of his order, in the decade after Margaret’s death.26

Moreover, it has also led scholars to see Giunta’s emphasis onMargaret’s institutional and spiritual connection to theFranciscans as evidence that, by the time Margaret died, the

23 Florence, Archivio di Stato, ‘Unione di vari luoghi pii di Cortona’. For more onthese indulgences, see Mary Harvey Doyno, ‘Lilies Among Thorns: Lay Saints andtheir 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 beentranscribed by Lodovico Bargigli da Pelago in Antica leggenda della vita e de’miracolidi S. Margherita di Cortona scritta dal di lei confessore fr. Giunta Bevegnati dell’Ordinede’Minori, 2 vols. (Lucca, 1793), Legenda, Note, Dissertazioni, and Registro.

24 Bargigli da Pelago, Antica leggenda, and Bargigli da Pelago, Sommario della storiadella chiesa e convento di Santa Margherita da Cortona, compilato e disposto per ordinecronologico dal P. Fra Lodovico Bargigli da Pelago, 1781, unpublished manuscript,Cortona, Archivio conventuale di Santa Margherita. Bargigli da Pelago’s work onMargaret has been studied by Iozzelli, ‘La tradizione manoscritta e le edizioni dellaLegenda’, in Legenda, 162–5; and ‘I miracoli nella ‘‘Legenda’’’, in Legenda, 217–19; aswell as by Cannon and Vauchez, Margherita of Cortona and the Lorenzetti, 15 and42–51. Although Fortunato Iozzelli’s 1997 critical edition of the Legenda hasbecome the preferred edition, scholars continue to rely on the basic timeline andconclusions 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 ofCortona, ed. Larson, 17; Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine and DemonicPossession in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, 2003), 100; David Burr, The SpiritualFranciscans: From Protest to Persecution in the Century after Saint Francis (UniversityPark, Pa., 2001), 325.




ownloaded from


Friars Minor were anxious to establish a clear affiliation with hercult as the news of her miracles spread and the many pilgrimscoming to see her in a church they did not control grew (SantaMargherita would not be under Franciscan control until 1392).27

However, neither the Legenda nor any outside source supportssuch conclusions or Bargigli da Pelago’s chronology.28

Both the terms Giunta uses to describe penitents and hismention of a datable episode suggest that he began to record, ormore accurately to monitor, Margaret’s behaviour at least twentyyears before she died, and in all likelihood immediately after shebecame a Franciscan penitent. Giunta begins the Legenda bydescribing how in 1277 Margaret had ‘humbly offered herselfon bended knees, with her hands joined and in tears to FriarRanaldo, custodian of Arezzo, for admission to the third orderof the blessed father Francis’.29 Elsewhere in the Legenda,Giunta describes other Cortonese penitents as ‘Brothers ofPenance’, and members of ‘the Order of Penitents’, terms thatnot only convey the fluid institutional status penitents had in thethirteenth century but also serve as evidence that Giunta waswriting before the formal creation of the Franciscan Third

27 Daniel Bornstein, ‘The Uses of the Body: The Church and the Cult of SantaMargherita da Cortona’, Church History, lxii (1993), 169–70; Anna Benvenuti Papi,‘In castro poenitentiae’: santita e societa femminile nell’Italia medievale (Italia Sacra, xlv,Rome, 1990), 141–68; and Andre Vauchez, ‘Medieval Penitents’, in Vauchez, TheLaity in the Middle Ages, 126.

28 For example, the Legenda is the only source I have found to mention theprovincial council meeting of the Tuscan Franciscans and it does not provide adate. In addition, while the Legenda does indicate that Giovanni da Castiglione diedwhile Margaret was still alive, we have no sources to tell us when this occurred. Bargiglida Pelago’s decision that Giovanni died in 1289 provides an example of how hisunsupported conclusions have become part of the scholarly consensus. In his studyof Franciscan inquisitors, D’Alatri claims that Giovanni most probably died in 1289and cites Bargigli da Pelago; see Mariano D’Alatri, L’Inquisizione francescana nell’ItaliaCentrale del Duecento: con il testo del ‘Liber inquisitionis’ di Orvieto (BibliothecaSeraphico-Capuccina, xlix, Rome, 1996), 350. Subsequently, scholars have citedD’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’sdeath precipitated a change in Giunta’s relationship with Margaret is also notsupported in the text. Christ repeatedly tells Margaret to relay various bits ofinformation to ‘Friar Giovanni and your confessor’, making clear that whileGiovanni was still alive, Giunta already had a close connection to Margaret and, forsome time, both men interacted with her. Iozzelli has noted that Bargigli da Pelagotried to impose more order on Giunta’s text than was actually there; see Iozzelli,‘Introduzione’, in Legenda, 60, n. 32.

29 Legenda, I, 1.




ownloaded from


Order in 1289.30 More evidence suggesting that he began hiswriting much earlier than scholars have suspected appears inthe text’s eighth chapter. Here Giunta notes that he had beggedMargaret to pray for peace in an impending battle betweenBolognese and French forces, a battle that Pope Nicholas III,whose papacy lasted from 1277 to 1280, was eventually ableto quell.31

A close reading of the text also suggests that it is not the work ofa single author, as many scholars have assumed, but rathercontains the voices (and perhaps the writing) of at least two ofMargaret’s confessors — Giunta and Ser Badia. Episodes thatwere probably witnessed (and perhaps written) by Ser Badiadescribe Margaret’s life at San Basilio and away from herFranciscan guardians. In these passages, Margaret is no longerthe dramatic and troubling lay penitent whose actions must bemonitored and assessed but is rather a visionary whose spiritualexperiences reveal and heal the sins of her contemporary urbanworld. Thus, while the Legenda began in an effort to checkMargaret’s religious life, at some point, and perhaps motivatedby Ser Badia’s response to Margaret, Giunta, without the supportof his order, changed the text’s motivation: instead of monitoringMargaret, Giunta now wrote (and revised what he had alreadywritten) with the hopes that he might convince other Franciscansthat 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’stransformation from concubine to saint was entirely dependentupon her connection with the Franciscan Order.32 In those samepassages where we see him making such an argument, we can alsosee evidence for how contentious and anxiety-ridden thatrelationship was from its inception. Nancy Caciola’s brief studyof Margaret in her work on divine and demonic possession in thelater Middle Ages stands out for being the first and (to myknowledge) only reading that confronts such a complexity in

30 D’Alatri noted the variety of terms Giunta uses to refer to penitents; see MarianoD’Alatri, ‘L’Ordine della penitenza nella leggenda di Margherita da Cortona’, in R.Pazzelli and L. Temperini (eds.) Prime manifestazioni di vita comunitaria maschile efemminile nel movimento francescano della penitenza (1215–1447), Atti del 48Convegno 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.




ownloaded from


this text.33 In constructing her argument that the Legenda is ‘a taleof two processes of reconstruction’ in which ‘Margaret remadeherself from paramour to penitent’, and Giunta ‘transformed herfrom penitent to saintly paragon’, Caciola identifies aspects ofthe text’s workings that other scholars have overlooked.34 Butwhile Caciola’s ideas have elucidated how the Franciscans’doubts and suspicions about Margaret’s transformation appearin passages that, at first glance, seem to celebrate her as a saint, heroverall understanding of the text and Margaret’s relationship withthe Franciscans remains tethered to, and thus limited by, Bargiglida Pelago’s faulty timeline.35 If we clear away the assumptionsand conclusions this timeline has produced, we can see that theFranciscans’ misgivings about Margaret began earlier, remainedafter reports of the miracles taking place at her tomb werecirculating, and exemplify a broader perception within theorder that associations with lay penitents, and most especiallyfemale lay penitents, were dangerous endeavours.

II

DOUBTING MARGARET

While we can imagine that as an unattached mother with ascandalous past, Margaret would have both wanted and neededthe prestige and the legitimacy the friars offered, Giunta usesMargaret’s desperation to frame many of his descriptions of herearly years in Cortona and in the process conveys his order’smisgivings about her penitential transformation.36 He writesthat when Margaret first became involved with the Franciscans,Christ had told her to remember the sorrow and despair she feltafter the death of her lover had left her homeless and her father

33 Caciola, Discerning Spirits, 99–113.34 For example, Caciola suspects that the complex role Giovanni da Castiglione

played in Margaret’s life influenced the beginnings of the Legenda. Moreover, sheidentifies what she calls ‘seams’ in the Legenda’s narrative that reveal a variety ofresponses to Margaret, including negative ones.

35 For example, Caciola writes that Giunta composed the vita ‘within a decade ofMargaret’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 andVauchez, 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 joina monastic community, a semi-religious life was probably the only religiousopportunity available to her; see Benvenuti Papi, ‘In castro poenitentiae’, 145.




ownloaded from


and stepmother had refused to help her and her son.37 Giuntaadds that Christ had also reminded her that it was through her‘filial fear’ of the Franciscans that her heart was healed. In therigorous routine of penance she adopted once she arrived inCortona, denying herself the ornaments, foods and comfortsshe was used to, Margaret had shared her ‘many gifts of fear,sorrow, and tears’ with both the Franciscans and theCortonese, asking them with such ‘sorrowful groans and sighs’if she would be rescued from the exile of her sinful life that, asGiunta notes, she ‘made the friars weep’.38

Three themes emerge from this passage to which Giunta willoften return. First, it is clear that Margaret’s sinful past hadconstant ramifications for her present religious life: the reader isrepeatedly told that Margaret’s past necessitates and intensifiesthe rigour of her present religious commitment. Secondly,Margaret’s fear of the Franciscans serves her penitentialprogress: not only does her ‘filial fear’ of the friars heal herheart but it also arouses in her feelings of shame for her sinfulpast. Thirdly, Margaret’s behaviour could elicit from the friarsstrong emotions. Giunta also writes in the Legenda’s first chapterthat Christ had reminded Margaret of how she would ‘blush’whenever she saw one of the friars ‘in church, in a house, or onthe street’, and ‘would not dare to sit down or even speak tosecular persons’ when she was with friars.39 At the chapter’send, Giunta provides some context for his repeated referencesto Margaret’s apprehension. For several years the Franciscanshad hesitated to give Margaret their habit of penance, havingfound her too pretty and too young to believe that she was trulydevoted to the penitential life.40

While Giunta goes on to note that the Franciscans dideventually offer her their habit, in the midst of his seeminglycelebratory prose we see repeated references to the friars’misgivings about Margaret’s religious life as well as toMargaret’s awareness of those ongoing concerns. For example,several passages in the text make clear that the friars tested boththe orthodoxy of Margaret’s beliefs and the veracity of hervisionary claims. Giunta describes how, soon after she became a

37 Legenda, I, 1(a).38 Ibid.39 Legenda, I, 1(b).40 Legenda, I, 1(c).




ownloaded from


Franciscan penitent, Margaret embarked upon a marathon eight-day confession, at the end of which Christ had promised her that,having been successfully cleansed of her sin, he would begin tocall her daughter.41 When Margaret finally did hear Christ callher daughter she collapsed. Some ‘envious people’, as Giuntadescribes them, insinuated that Margaret had only pretended tocollapse. In response, the friars had a number of women dragMargaret on the ground and pull her hair to verify her ecstaticstate.42 The friars also tested Margaret verbally. Giunta recountshow he and the guardian of the friars, Friar Ubaldo, had visitedMargaret to speak to her about Christ’s Passion. During theirconversation, Margaret became ‘overcome with grief’ and toldthe friars that if she had been present at the crucifixion she wouldhave asked to be sent to hell if it would have saved Christ fromsuffering.43 Giunta notes that Friar Ubaldo became upset, tellingMargaret that such sentiments were ‘contrary to the divinedispensation’ but concludes the episode by noting that after thefriars had left, Christ reassured Margaret that he had understoodthe sentiment of her words and did not think the friars shoulddoubt her.44

The Legenda points to the friars’ doubts in more subtle ways aswell. The repeated comparisons Giunta makes betweenMargaret’s present spiritual progress and her past shame drawupon a hagiographic trope: the saint is all the more holy forthe life of sin he or she has transcended. And yet the extent towhich Giunta relies on such a trope underscores how muchMargaret’s history continued to vex her guardians. Margaret’stransformation is all the more remarkable, Giunta continuallynotes, because of the depths of sin from which she hademerged. He reminds his reader of the pleasure she had oncetaken in parading up and down the streets of Montepulcianowearing the ornate clothes, golden hairslides and make-up thatmarked her status as a kept woman.45 He adds that the routine she

41 Legenda, II, 1(f).42 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 theLater 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.




ownloaded from


adopted of fasting, prayer and self-mutilation (often leaving herbody covered in bruises and cuts and too weak to get up from thebare floor where she slept) was meant to purge herself of thememories and effects of her former life.46

That former life could not have been far from Giunta’s thoughtswhen he described Margaret running through the streets ofCortona on one Good Friday ‘as if she were drunk, weeping andgroaning, like a mother who had just lost her son’.47 Margaretstopped her circuit of the city when she reached the Franciscans’convent but would have continued to other churches, Giuntanotes, if her sense of decency and fear of the friars had notrestrained her. The analogy Giunta uses here — that Margaretgroaned ‘like a mother who had just lost her son’ — reminds thereader that Margaret was herself a mother. In other passages,Margaret is presented as having seen her son, whom sheeventually sent to live in a Franciscan convent in Arezzo, as bothevidence of her former shame and a distraction from her life ofpenance.48 Like the vitae of many other late medieval mother-saints, the Legenda celebrates Margaret’s neglect of her son; shedemonstrates her religious commitment by preferring to care forthe poor rather than tend to her son.49 But Giunta’s description ofthe maternal quality of Margaret’s moaning on Good Friday alsoseems aimed at reminding his readers of the circumstances that ledto her running through the streets and groaning in the first place.Even in her moments of penitential exuberance, the reader seemsto be reminded, Margaret cannot shake off her former identity: shewill always be a fallen woman, the mother of a bastard son.

Giunta’s writing also conveys how aware Margaret was that, inthe eyes of others, her past shame continued to stain her present

46 Legenda, II, 1(a). For similarities between Margaret and stories told about MaryMagdalen, see Katherine Ludwig Jansen, The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching andPopular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton, 2000), 252, 280–2; andBenvenuti 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). Forevidence that he ended up living with the Arentine Franciscans (and perhaps evenbecame a friar), see Legenda II, 1(g); VI, 15; VIII, 17; IX, 27.

49 ‘Maternal martyrdom’ was quite common in the vitae of thirteenth-centuryItalian female saints; see Barbara Newman, ‘‘‘Crueel Corage’’: Child Sacrifice andthe Maternal Martyr in Hagiography and Romance’, in From Virile Woman toWomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia, 1995), 76–107; for Newman’s specific discussion of Margaret, see 87–8 and 93–4.




ownloaded from


identity. He recounts that he had once prevented her fromreturning to Montepulciano, where, with a shaven head andwearing only a slip, she had planned to ‘shame herself ’ publiclyby having another woman lead her through the streets on a leash,crying: ‘Here is Margaret, dear people, who has harmed so manyin your town with her arrogance, her vanity and her badexample’.50 Although Giunta writes that, ‘under pain ofobedience’, he was able to stop her, he still praises her impulseto shame herself, noting that she would eventually be rewardedfor such obedience.51

The dramatic nature of these plans as well as Margaret’sdecision to alert Giunta to them in advance suggest that shesaw such public acts as opportunities not only to prove herobedience to the friars but also to use the people of Cortona’sadmiration of her as protection against the Franciscans’ enduringdoubts. Giunta refers to Margaret’s growing civic fame when herecounts a night the devil tempted her to take pride in herreputation. Christ had given her so many virtues, the devilnoted, that she had become famous among people of all ranks.Margaret’s response to the devil’s observations confirms at thesame time as recasts the significance of those words. After hearingthe devil’s taunts, Giunta writes, Margaret passed part of thenight in silence. Before the night was over, however, she got upand began to shout from the balcony of the house where she wasstaying, ‘Get up, people of Cortona, get up! Arise I tell you, anddrive me out of town with stones, for I am a sinner who hastransgressed against God and my neighbours!’ As Margaretcontinued to weep and wail, Giunta reports that people camefrom all around to see her and, having ‘only admiration andcompassion’, they returned to their homes ‘inspired’ and ‘full ofremorse for their own sins’.52

On one hand, Giunta’s recounting of this episode callsattention to the potential dangers Margaret’s growing

50 Legenda, II, 7.51 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 todisobey, he would stop hearing her confession and the other friars would stop caringfor her; see Legenda, II, 8. Caroline Bynum has noted how late medieval theologiansoften urged religious women to restrain their asceticism and Eucharistic devotion; seeCaroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food toMedieval Women (Berkeley, 1987), 237–44.

52 Legenda, II, 6.




ownloaded from


reputation and fame brought: her fame could be a source of vanityand pride. But on the other hand, his text also points to thepractical and protective results Margaret found by acting onthat renown. When she referenced her past sins, Margaretcould both control the content of the concerns she knew herFranciscan guardians held about her and inspire her fellowCortonese to consider their own transgressions. The esteemand devotion her outburst garnered from her neighbours couldshield Margaret from the friars’ doubts: how threatening couldthe friars’ concerns be if all of Cortonaviewed her as the city’s holywoman? Caciola has noted the ‘conscious self-fashioning as asaint’ we see when Margaret replied to a woman doubting herpenitential transformation that those same people chiding herwould eventually be calling her a saint and making pilgrimagesto her tomb.53 While Margaret may have been consciouslycrafting her saintly status, we should not lose sight of thepossibility that she cultivated such a reputation in order toprotect herself from her doubting guardians.

Other passages in the Legenda, however, make clear thatMargaret remained worried about how the friars would react toher public displays. While her outbursts won her more devoteesamong the people of Cortona, they also increased theFranciscans’ misgivings about her. For example, Giuntadescribes a time when Margaret asked him during a Mass in thechurch of San Francesco to wait until after the service to give hercommunion. She was afraid of being seen ‘before the friars’ altarwith a rope around her neck and her head uncovered, weepinguncontrollably’, fearing, Giunta adds, that she would be accusedof pretence or of fabricating her experiences.54 Giunta also makesseveral references to times when Margaret refused to give himdetails about her divine conversations and visions, sometimesascribing her silences to her great humility, but also explainingthat she had withheld information from the friars because of herkeen awareness of how she was perceived by others.55

The most dramatic example of Margaret’s public visionary lifecomes in what Giunta describes as her ‘mental crucifixion’.56

53 Caciola, Discerning Spirits, 102.54 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


(cont. on p. 73)



ownloaded from


Giunta writes that as Margaret narrated to those around her eachmoment of Christ’s Passion as it unfolded in her head, her bodyconveyed the drama of what she saw. She ground her teeth,twisted her body until she became pale, her pulse stopped andfinally ‘her body became cold as ice’.57 Her movements were sostriking, he writes, that both he and others believed that ‘she wasabout to die’. And although Christ would reassure her that thisvision had been a public affair precisely because she was a ‘mirrorof sinners’ who could inspire even the most obstinate of sinners tobe saved, when she awoke and saw the people surrounding her,she became upset that she had experienced Christ’s Passion ‘infront of the people, rather than in her cell’.58

Despite her concern, Margaret’s dramatic behaviourcontinued. Giunta writes that Margaret began to run aroundthe city asking those she passed if they had seen the crucifiedChrist. Her anxiety was so powerful that during the days thatfollowed she was left unable to eat or sleep and moved those sheencountered to tears.59 Finally, during a sermon Giunta deliveredin San Francesco not long after this vision, Margaret ‘could notrestrain her impulses of sorrow’ and stood up, as Giuntadescribes, ‘in front of everyone’, shouting ‘like someone out ofher mind’. She asked Giunta in such an emotion-filled voicewhether he knew where ‘the crucified Lord’ had been takenthat the entire congregation burst into tears.60 Giunta’sirritation at the interruption comes through in the text: he notesthat he was only able to regain control of his audience by assuringMargaret ‘in a loud voice’ that Christ would make his presenceknown to all soon.61

Although Giunta includes phrases that aim to praise Margaret’sbehaviour — her public outburst was made with ‘sincerity andpiety’ and came from someone ‘full of love for Christ’ — hisrepeated mention that she was acting like someone ‘out of her

(n. 56 cont.)

crucifixion’ inside San Francesco. The detailed description that follows makes clearthat 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.




ownloaded from


mind’ and that she was in a state of acute anxiety illustrates theextent to which she not only had annoyed but also had disturbedhim.62 His immediate turn to describing the friars’ condemnationof Margaret at their provincial meeting in Siena suggests thatafter such a dramatic outburst, the order had becomeconvinced that the time had come to act on their long-heldconcerns. Giunta first mentions the provincial meeting bynoting that Margaret had predicted its outcome. She reportedthat the Holy Spirit had revealed to her that the Franciscans’doubts about her were based on both ‘scripture and whatthey had heard from many people suffering from delusion’.63

Margaret’s prophecy, Giunta points out, was correct: ‘the newlyelected custodian of Arezzo’ arrived at her cell to inform her thatthe friars were ‘certain that her whole way of life, her revelations,and her consolations were nothing but deceptions’, adding thatthey believed she had pretended to have visions ‘in order tobecome famous among the populace’.64 Margaret was alsoinformed that Giunta’s visits to her would be limited to onceevery eight days.65 Overwhelmed by this news, trembling andweeping, Margaret begged Christ to help her, crying that shecould not do more than she was already doing to deal with thefriars, whose doubts about her were terrifying.66

Even though Margaret’s emotional reaction points to howseriously she took the Franciscans’ condemnation, scholarshave tended to de-emphasize this denunciation by arguing boththat the Franciscans’ misgivings about Margaret were gone by thetime of her death and that the Legenda stands as the order’sattempt to argue for her quintessentially Franciscan sanctity.67

62 Legenda, V, 5 and 6.63 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. Whilein one passage two chapters after the mention of the Siena meeting, the Legenda doesrefer to Giovanni as the then-confirmed custodian (‘tunc custode conferrem’, seeLegenda, 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 Giovanniwho delivered the renunciations.

65 Legenda, V, 9. Angela of Foligno’s confessor and scribe, Friar A. also had his visitslimited 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, 99and 111–12; and Burr, Spiritual Franciscans, 325. To some extent, Caciola’s work


(cont. on p. 75)



ownloaded from


Bargigli da Pelago’s timeline has been pivotal in producing theseconclusions. In addition to proposing dates (the Franciscans’provincial meeting, Giunta’s appointment as Margaret’sprimary confessor and his move to Siena) that have encouragedreaders to assume that the friar did most of his writing afterMargaret’s death, this chronology has also led scholars toconclude that Giunta’s absence from Cortona ended shortlybefore February 1297 and that, as a result, the friar was withMargaret when she died. Two passages from the Legendaappear to support this conclusion. In the first, Margaret claimsthat Christ had promised her that her confessor would be with herat the moment of her death.68 In the second, Giunta writes thatthere were many things he was unable to include in the text bothbecause Margaret concealed many of God’s secrets and becausehe had been away from Cortona for seven years.69 Scholars seemthus to have reasoned that if Giunta was allowed to return toMargaret’s deathbed, the order must by that time have reversedits negative assessment of her.70

But if we look more closely at the text we see that while Christdoes reassure Margaret that her confessor will be with her whenshe dies, it is not clear to which confessor he is referring. Giunta,Ser Badia, as well as other friars are referred to throughout the textas Margaret’s confessors.71 And although Giunta places great andrepeated emphasis in the text on Margaret’s connection to anddependence upon the Franciscans, there is no evidence in the textthat either he or any other friars were at her side when she died.While throughout much of the text Giunta names each friar

(n. 67 cont.)

stands apart here. She notes that this episode serves as the text’s ‘thematic arc’, arguingthat it probably ‘galvanized debate about Margaret locally’, and brought her to theattention of the provincial chapter; see Caciola, Discerning Spirits, 101 and 104.Nevertheless, Caciola seems to assume, as other scholars relying upon Bargigli daPelago’s timeline have, that the Franciscans’ misgivings about Margaret haddisappeared 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 ofAuthenticity’, Giunta lists those friars who had seen the text and refers to FraUbaldo of Colle as having also served as Margaret’s confessor; see Legenda,‘Appendix’.




ownloaded from


who interacted with Margaret, in the passage describing her deaththe reader is given only the most general description of thereligious present. We learn that when Margaret died and ‘thosewho were assisting her’ noticed the sweet smell that came fromher body, they became convinced that she had been ‘a vessel ofholiness’.72 Moreover, as word spread of her death, we aretold that it was the Cortonese who rushed up the hill to SanBasilio to wrap her body in purple robes and place it in a tomb,doing so ‘in the presence of distinguished persons, clerics andreligious’.73 The Legenda thus credits the people of Cortona(and not the Franciscans) as the ones most eager to treat thisonce fallen woman as a saint.

III

‘WHY THE FRIARS OUGHT NOT TO PROMOTE THE

ORDER OF PENITENTS’

Scholars’ willingness to accept the assumptions and conclusionsembedded in Bargigli da Pelago’s timeline reveal not onlyGiunta’s success in framing Margaret’s life as a Franciscanstory but also the extent to which scholars have approached thehistory of lay religion in the late medieval cities as a corollary ofmendicant history.74 Although both Margaret’s life and cult wereundeniably associated with the Cortonese Franciscans, thetension and suspicion that a close reading of the Legenda revealsboth Margaret and her guardians felt about their associationmakes clear that this lay penitent and her mendicant guardians

72 Legenda, X, 19.73 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 womenand the lay communities out of which they emerged; see F. Thomas Luongo, TheSaintly Politics of Catherine of Siena (Ithaca, 2006); and Dominican Penitent Women,ed. and trans. Maiju Lehmijoki-Gardner (New York, 2005); Maiju Lehmijoki-Gardner, Worldly Saints: Social Interaction of Dominican Penitent Women in Italy,1200–1500 (Helsinki, 1999); and Maiju Lehmijoki-Gardner, ‘Writing ReligiousRules as an Interactive Process: Dominican Penitent Women and the Making oftheir Regula’, Speculum, lxxix, 3 (2004). Moreover, scholars looking at the lives ofeither Clare or Francis of Assisi invariably consider the transformation eachundertook from layperson to religious; see Andre Vauchez, Francis of Assisi: The Lifeand Afterlife of a Medieval Saint, trans. Michael F. Cusato (New Haven, 2012);Augustine Thompson, Francis of Assisi: A New Biography (Ithaca, 2012); andCatherine Mooney, ‘Imitatio Christi or Imitatio Mariae? Clare of Assisi and HerInterpreters’ in Catherine M. Mooney (ed.), Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints andtheir Interpreters (Philadelphia, 1999), ch. 4.




ownloaded from


were far from participants in a single and harmonious narrative.But this raises an obvious question: is Margaret’s case too extremeto warrant a more general rethinking of how we approach thehistory of lay penitents? Without doubt, her history of sexualand moral transgressions as well as her dramatic penitential lifewould have made her particularly difficult for any religiousorganization to embrace. Nevertheless if we turn to look at theconcerns voiced by an anonymous friar in the mid thirteenthcentury, we see how they echo the Cortonese Franciscans’worries about Margaret, suggesting that she was far from theonly lay penitent who troubled the order.

Once thought to be the work of Bonaventure but nowcommonly attributed to an unknown friar, probably ofGermanic origin, the Determinations of Questions Concerning theRule (c.1260) gives a lengthy account of what the author sees asthe many causes of his order’s spiritual decline.75 In a sectiontitled ‘Why the friars should not promote the Order ofPenitents’, the author lists the risks posed by associationsbetween friars and lay penitents.76 All of the friar’s pointsconverge around issues of control and liability. In short, theauthor sees the Franciscans’ involvement with penitents asheralding a disastrous loss of freedom as well as potentialdamage to the order’s reputation. What if a penitent was to becalled before an ecclesiastical or secular court? It would be thefriars who would be expected to intercede on that penitent’sbehalf.77 And, what if either the penitent or his accusers were topoint their finger at the Franciscans, arguing that the friars hadnot done enough to steer their charges toward good behaviour?Or worse, what if either the penitent or his accusers claimed thatthe friars themselves had encouraged such bad behaviour?78

75 (Pseudo)-Bonaventure, Determinationes quaestionum circa regulam fratrumminorum, 337–74. The section concerning the friars’ interaction with lay penitentsalso appears in Meersseman (ed.), Dossier de l’ordre de la penitence, 123–4. On the text’sauthorship, see Ignatius Brady, ‘The Writings of Saint Bonaventure Regarding theFranciscan Order’, (Miscellanea Francescana, lxxv, 1975), 107. For a brief summaryof the author’s explanations for the order’s decline, see David Burr, Olivi andFranciscan Poverty: The Origins of the Usus Pauper Controversy (Philadelphia, 1989),3–4, and 7; also see Senocak, The Poor and the Perfect, 193–4.

76 (Pseudo)-Bonaventure, Determinationes quaestionum circa regulam fratrumminorum, 368–9.

77 (Pseudo)-Bonaventure, Determinationes quaestionum circa regulam fratrumminorum, 368.

78 Ibid.




ownloaded from


Associations with lay penitents, this author’s questions makeclear, present the order with an untenable situation. If they attachthemselves to those who are excessively helpless (most often, theauthor notes, women or Beguines), the friars become not onlyspiritually but also financially responsible for their charges.79 Butif they associate with rich penitents, they will be accused of goingafter those penitents’ wealth. Moreover, the author notes, suchassociations only increase the secular clergy’s ire towards theFranciscans: as more penitents placed themselves under theorder’s obedience, the friars would stand to gain but the secularclergy would inevitably lose testamentary benefits.80

Finally, the author concludes, an association with lay penitentsleaves the order vulnerable to charges of heresy and sexualmisconduct. How can the friars guard against heresy when laypenitents’ ministers resemble the teachers of heretics and thepenitents themselves remain in their private homes with theirspouses and children?81 Imagine the disaster that would befallthe order, the author speculates, if a penitent, who had beenaccused of fornication or adultery, implicated a friar as heraccomplice. Who would seem more likely to be responsible fora female penitent’s pregnancy than the friars with whomshe had spent all of her time?82 The Determinations’ lastpoints encourage us to speculate as to the motive for the Tuscanfriars’ condemnation of Margaret. While we have no direct evidencefor why the order denounced her, the friars’ questioning ofMargaret’s religious beliefs (Friar Ubaldo’s examination of herideas about Christ’s Passion, for example) and their reassignmentof her primary confessor, Giunta, to Siena suggest that they mayhave had the same kinds of concerns about Margaret’s beliefs andrelationships that the author of the Determinations foresaw in anyassociation between the friars and lay penitents. According to thisfriar, a connection to a lay penitent was a distracting, dangerous,and potentially disastrous enterprise. Consistent with the manylayers that make up the Legenda, however, Margaret’s story doesnot end with the Franciscans’ condemnation. If we return to thistext and explore its descriptions of Margaret’s experiences once

79 Ibid.80 (Pseudo)-Bonaventure, Determinationes quaestionum circa regulam fratrum

minorum, 369.81 Ibid.82 Ibid.




ownloaded from


she was living away from her Franciscan guardians, we see aradically different understanding of the relationship between laypenitent and religious guardian.

IV

MARGARET AT SAN BASILIO

In the middle of the Legenda’s seventh chapter, the reader is toldthat on 1 May (the year is not given), Margaret decided to movefrom her cell near the church of San Francesco to another cellattached to the run-down church of San Basilio, half a mile abovethe city centre, in order ‘to escape the tumult of society andhuman contacts’.83 Such an explanation is at odds with boththe text’s descriptions of the community of lay penitents thatformed around Margaret at San Basilio as well as the manycharters that detail the process of rebuilding that church.84 Thesesources make clear that the community of lay penitents whichattended to Margaret during the last years of her life andremained at the church to manage her cult was sizeable andactive.85 Margaret does not, therefore, seem to have found a lifeof solitude when she left the centre of Cortona. While scholarshave suspected that Margaret’s decision to move was motivatedby her desire to escape the doubts and condemnation of herFranciscan guardians, they have not explored the way the toneand content of the descriptions of her religious life changed onceshe left the city centre.86

While we have no direct evidence that any Franciscans werewith her when she died, it is plausible that Ser Badia, Margaret’sconfessor at San Basilio, was. It also seems likely that during theseven years that Giunta was in Siena, Ser Badia served asMargaret’s primary confessor and, perhaps at Giunta’s request,kept track of his interactions with her in writing.87 And if we work

83 Legenda, VII, 26.84 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 theBody’, 167; and Caciola, Discerning Spirits, 108.

87 Iozzelli has posited that Giunta relied upon Badia for reports of Margaret whilethe friar was in Siena; see Iozzelli, ‘Introduzione’, in Legenda, 37–8. In addition topassages that explicitly identify Ser Badia as their witness, the text also contains severalreferences to Badia writing about his experiences with Margaret. For example, in one


(cont. on p. 80)



ownloaded from


backwards from the description of Margaret’s death to look at theLegenda with fresh eyes that have not been conditioned to see theFranciscans as having only a passing mistrust of their lay penitent,we can see that, in many of the episodes describing her religiouslife once she was living at San Basilio, Margaret is no longer thepublic penitent, whose dramatic performances Giuntainterpreted as aiming to redeem her past shame.88 Instead, atSan Basilio Ser Badia describes Margaret as a visionary whoseprimary task is to relay the words of Christ. In short, the suspicionand concern that so marked the Cortonese friars’ interaction withMargaret and that we see echoed in the Determinations arenowhere to be found.

In many of the passages that seem to refer to her time at SanBasilio, the Legenda describes Margaret relaying advice that Christhad given to her to pass on to Ser Badia. Christ’s advice for Badiamakes clear that, like Margaret, this cleric has had a conversionexperience; his sinful past shapes both his present religiouscommitment and his facility as Margaret’s confessor.89 Insteadof raising questions about the validity of Margaret’s experiencesor emphasizing the difference between confessor and penitent,these episodes portray Margaret and Badia sharing a similarspiritual history and devotional attitude.90 Moreover, in episodesdescribing Margaret’s time at San Basilio that do not specificallymention Badia, we also see a portrait of her that is strikinglydifferent 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

(n. 87 cont.)

passage, Christ encourages Margaret not to worry if at times the cleric does not believethe things he has written about her; see Legenda, VII, 33. While Giunta describeshimself 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 eitherno 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 andconversations with Christ. For example, see Legenda, VIII, 2.

88 Although it is difficult, if not impossible, to identify all of the passages in theLegenda written after Margaret’s move, many of the episodes recorded in the fifth totenth chapters seem to describe events that took place at San Basilio.

89 Mary Harvey Doyno, ‘‘‘A Particular Light of Understanding’’: Margaret ofCortona, the Franciscans, and a Cortonese Cleric’, in Rachel Fulton and Bruce W.Holsinger (eds.), History in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the Matter ofPerson (New York, 2007), 68–78.

90 Doyno, ‘A Particular Light of Understanding’, 74–6.




ownloaded from


Margaret that while in the past she had proclaimed his Passion‘in a loud voice and with inconsolable tears’, she now remainedsilent ‘out of fear of being accused of vainglory’. Although Christgoes on to encourage her to return to her more dramaticdevotions and ‘not to fear the whispering of worldly people’who were questioning her behaviour, the text includes nofurther description of the kinds of visionary spectacles thatmarked her time living in Cortona.91 Instead of describing howher body illustrated the fervour of her spiritual experiences, thetext gives an extended account of the words Christ funnelledthrough Margaret, which first proclaim the details of his lifeand Passion, and then lament the dismal moral shape ofcontemporary urban society.92

This is not to say, however, that the Legenda gives no sense of aphysical dimension to Margaret’s visionary life at San Basilio. In avision that Margaret experienced in her San Basilio cell duringAdvent, the saint claimed to have seen an angel with six wings inthe midst of flames appear above her. But while the reader is toldthat she lay limp in the arms of her companions, the text’semphasis is not on describing or interpreting her physicaldemeanour but rather on conveying the details of thecomplaints Christ funnels through Margaret. Christ lamentsthe sins of ‘bad virgins, married people . . . widows . . . cheatingmerchants 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 ‘defraudtheir customers with their weights and measures’.93 He tellsMargaret that he deplores ‘the married who debase the state ofmatrimony’ claiming that ‘they should really be called adulterers’,and that he is grieved by people’s interest in the latest fashionsin clothes and jewellery, which ‘fill the soul with obscenethoughts’. Finally, he informs her that he takes no pleasure inthe prayers, pilgrimages, almsgiving, fasts and other good worksperformed by those who engage in ‘the use of perfumes,ornaments and ribbons’.94

91 Legenda, V, 12.92 Legenda, V, 13.93 Legenda, IX, 35 and 40.94 Legenda, IX, 40.




ownloaded from


The references to Margaret’s own past are hard to miss here.We know from Giunta’s descriptions in the first half of the Legendahow much pride Margaret took in her appearance as she paradedup and down the streets of Montepulciano as a nobleman’sconcubine.95 But in these references, Margaret’s past is nolonger a burden hampering her present religious life butsomething that allows her to be the perfect messenger ofChrist’s grievances. In effect, the text seems to argue thatMargaret’s past has made her all the more able to show otherlaywomen and laymen the path to salvation. At the end of hislong list of complaints, Christ notes that although he hasendured insults and beatings, urban sinners ‘will not tolerateeven a word of criticism’, because, as he tells Margaret, ‘theyrefuse to see me as their mirror and model of behaviour andlisten to sermons about me’.96 The phrase ‘mirror and model’appears elsewhere in the Legenda. During her ‘mentalcrucifixion’, Christ had reassured Margaret that it had been apublic event precisely so that she might inspire others as ‘themirror of sinners’.97 In addition, in several conversations thatseem to take place at San Basilio, Christ tells Margaret that herpenitential transformation has made her a mirror and model forthe laity.98

Acting therefore more as a proxy for Christ’s words than as arepresentation of his suffering, Margaret relays criticism of hercontemporary world at the same time as she embodies thepotential for its penitential transformation. Instead of serving toraise concern about the validity of her new religious life,references made to her past during the time she was living atSan Basilio are used to encourage the Cortonese to identifywith Margaret and model their own conversions on hers. As aresult, the Legenda begins to adopt a more straightforward andrecognizable strategy to argue for Margaret’s sanctity. Instead ofseeing her behaviour as attempts to make up for her sinful past,the San Basilio passages are more concerned to relay howMargaret’s visionary experiences influence others. In this vein,the text goes on to describe how Margaret became known for

95 Legenda, II, 7.96 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.




ownloaded from


praying for the release of souls from purgatory and how herreputation for effective prayers was so strong that peoplecame to her not only from far away provinces but also frompurgatory to seek her aid.99 Moreover, we hear about theextensive help Margaret offered her neighbours, often leadingthem to make full confessions.100 And finally, we learn ofMargaret’s work to secure peace within the city of Cortonaand with its external rivals, activities that briefly bring herback into contact with Giunta.101

V

REASSESSING MARGARET

In the Legenda’s eighth chapter, Christ orders Margaret to callGiunta back from Siena so that he can help broker a peacebetween the Rosso family and the Cortonese. In a passage thatappears to have been written by Giunta, the friar reveals that thiswas not the first time he had tried to arrange such a truce betweenthe Cortonese citizens and this family. He writes that during hisfirst attempt he had been distracted by doubts he had aboutMargaret and had been tempted ‘to turn against the daughterof God’. In a candid passage, Giunta reveals that he had begunto believe that Margaret was ‘indiscreet in her devotions andexcessive in her austerities’. He notes that as a result he hadstopped 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]’. Christgoes 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, sincemany murmured against me, his creator’. Finally Christ tellsMargaret to instruct Giunta to ‘reflect on my Passion’, a time,

99 For example, in one episode, Margaret received visits from the souls of twoshoemakers who had been murdered before they had the chance to confess theirsins; see Legenda, VIII, 5. For more on medieval women’s particular role inadvocating for those in purgatory, see Barbara Newman, ‘On the Threshold of theDead: Purgatory, Hell, and Religious Women’, in Newman, From Virile Woman toWomanChrist, ch. 4.

100 Legenda, IX, 30–4.101 Legenda, VIII, 12–13.




ownloaded from


he notes, ‘when many of those who crucified me later adored me’.Christ ends his advice to Giunta by encouraging the friar ‘to workdiligently to achieve peace among the people of Cortona’, for, ashe relays through Margaret, ‘I will be with him in everything’.102

In his study of the Legenda’s portrait of the relationship betweenMargaret and Giunta, John Coakley has argued that we can seeGiunta’s hand directing Margaret’s conversations with Christaway from her own devotional experience and towards applyingthat 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 Margaretand Ser Badia, Christ notes here how Giunta’s doubts areopportunities for the friar’s own spiritual growth. By revealinghis misgivings toward Margaret, Giunta stakes out a connectionto Christ that mirrors one that Margaret has had. And while themurmurings and tribulations that Christ notes that Giunta facescould be the result of his efforts to establish peace in Cortona, wemight also wonder if such difficulties were the consequence of hisrelationship with Margaret.

In fact, we might wonder if Giunta has provided his readerswith a clue to explain the text’s disorder. On one hand, theLegenda articulates the deep and continuing concerns theFranciscans had about Margaret. But on the other hand, it alsomakes clear that at some point, and as this passage seems tosuggest, most likely before her death, Giunta no longer agreedwith his order’s negative assessment. In several passages,Margaret claims that Christ had warned her about thehardships — the ‘murmurings’ and ‘tribulations’ — that bothshe and the Franciscan order were already experiencing andwould continue to face. For example, Christ prefaces anextended description of his Passion by warning Margaret thatshe will ‘be in the furnace of suffering’ until the day she dies,and that with each new consolation that he grants her arises ‘anew army of jealous enemies’.104 Christ goes on to make anexplicit connection between his suffering and Margaret’s: justas ‘the world despised and did not know me’, he reassures

102 Legenda, VIII, 12.103 John Coakley, ‘The Limits of Religious Authority: Margaret of Cortona and

Giunta Bevegnati’, in Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and their MaleCollaborators (New York, 2006), 130–48.

104 Legenda, IV, 16 and 18.




ownloaded from


Margaret, ‘it is my will that you too be despised, and that peoplemurmur about you’.105

In other conversations, Christ makes clear that it is not justMargaret but also her Franciscan guardians who will enduretribulations and sufferings. Like Margaret, Christ notes, theFriars Minor would face ‘murmurings’; and, just as she shouldnot be concerned the friars also should not worry, since peoplemurmured about him as well.106 Such references to tribulationson the horizon for the Franciscanorder have led scholars towonderif Margaret and Giunta had associations with the Franciscanspirituals, those friars who criticized what they saw as the order’srelaxed interpretation of Francis’s call for poverty and humility.107

The Legenda’s mention of several people known to have either beenmembers or supporters of the spiritual wing has added weightto this suspicion.108 In an appendix to his study of theFranciscan spirituals, David Burr provides a valuable survey ofthe scholarship on this subject and concludes that even thoughthere is ‘very little evidence’ directly to support it, MarioSensi’s argument that Giunta was attempting to whitewashMargaret’s association with known spiritual sympathizers seemsplausible.109 I would argue, however, that any attempt to place

105 Legenda, V, 24.106 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 Cortonanel contesto storico-sociale’ Collectanea franciscana 69 (1999): 223–62; and PieroScappecchi, ‘Santa Margherita nella societa cortonese del XIII secolo: Appunti sul‘liber fraternitatis Sancta Marie de Misericordia de Cortona’ e alter fontimargaritiane’. Accademia Etrusca di Cortona Annuario 28 (1997–98): 183–206; andBurr, Spiritual Franciscans.

108 For example, in the same chapter in which Christ outlines the comingtribulations for the friars, the reader learns that ‘Friar Conrad, beloved of God’ hadcome ‘from a distant province’ to see Margaret: Legenda, IX, 24. Scholars havesuspected that this refers to Conrad of Offida (d. 1307). In addition, in his‘Testament of Authenticity’, Giunta mentions that Napoleone Orsini, the papallegate and spiritual sympathizer, had held the Legenda in Rome for several monthsbefore 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, isnamed in that declaration as well, having accompanied Orsini to Cortona as hisagent. Ubertino is also mentioned within the Legenda: he accompanies Margaret’sson to her cell after the boy was caught sleeping through Matins at the Franciscanconvent where he was living.

109 Burr, Spiritual Franciscans, 325–34. Burr’s analysis, however, does rely onBargigli da Pelago’s faulty timeline. He writes that while it is impossible to sayexactly when Giovanni da Castiglione ordered Giunta to compose the Legenda, itprobably occurred sometime between Margaret’s death in 1297 and late 1307. As I


(cont. on p. 86)



ownloaded from


Margaret in one or the other Franciscan camp is, to some extent, ameaningless exercise. As a laywoman, Margaret had noopportunity to attach herself formally to either Franciscanwing. Nevertheless, her lay status would still have given her thefreedom to associate with a variety of friars, who we can assumemight have had difficulty associating with each other. There isno denying that the text uses an apocalyptic language that wouldhave been familiar within contemporary Franciscan circles. Butwe are left to wonder if the many references to the persecution,tribulations and murmurings that both Margaret and the orderwill face say more about the pressure and perhaps persecutionfaced by both Giunta and other friars who supported Margaret asthey attempted to rehabilitate her reputation, than about aspiritual agenda.110

In her study of the vita-panel that was probably painted in thedecade after Margaret’s death, and thus before Giunta hadcompleted the Legenda, Joanna Cannon has noted how muchmore suited this piece of visual hagiography was to instruct thelaity on Margaret’s sanctity than was the Legenda.111 In additionto describing the Legenda as ‘long’ and ‘diffuse’, Cannon pointsout that it was neither translated nor abridged in the vernacularduring the Middle Ages.112 Coupled with the fact that only threemedieval manuscripts of the text survive, it seems unlikely thatGiunta’s text was used as preaching material, as he mentions inhis ‘Testament of Authenticity’ he intended it to be.113 Instead, asthis study has argued, it seems more plausible that the Legenda

(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 aboutMargaret long before her 1297 death.

110 We can assume, however, that the mention of known spirituals was a factor inMargaret being denied canonization in 1325 when Cortona’s commune and the laypenitential community living at San Basilio presented her case to the papacy, a periodwhen the persecution of the spirituals was quite active. For more on the joint efforts ofthe commune and lay community to have Margaret canonized, see Cannon andVauchez, Margherita of Cortona and the Lorenzetti, 157–8; and Doyno, ‘Lily AmongThorns’, 345–8.

111 Joanna Cannon, ‘Beyond the Limitations of Visual Typology: Reconsidering theFunction and Audience of Three Vita Panels of Women Saints c.1300’, in ItalianPanel 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)



ownloaded from


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 ownadmission that he had been preoccupied, suggest the difficultieshe must have encountered when he tried to reimagine thistroublesome lay penitent as an emblem of Franciscan ideals.114

The Legenda’s disorder keeps us from coming to exactconclusions: we do not know when Giunta changed thepurpose of his text, exactly what led him to such a change, andprecisely to whom his pleas that Margaret was not only a saint butalso a quintessentially Franciscan saint were directed. But mydismantling of Bargigli da Pelago’s timeline and theassumptions it has produced demonstrates that the Legenda isfar from a straightforward piece of hagiography. Moreover, myidentification not only of the tensions, suspicions andrecriminations that are buried within the text’s seeminglycelebratory prose but also of the related anxieties held by theanonymous Franciscan author of the Determinationsdemonstrate how wary the friars were of forming associationswith lay penitents. Despite these conclusions, one might stillquestion the extent to which such sentiments suggest aprevalent reluctance within the Franciscan order to embrace laypenitents. Both Margaret’s past and her behaviour as a penitentplaced her in sharp distinction from most thirteenth-century laypenitents; moreover, the Determinations could be dismissed as thepoint of view of one exceptionally cranky friar.

The path toward a broader application of this evidence can befound in pairing it with an early Franciscan effort to create ahistory of their Third Order. In the late fourteenth century,around the same time that the Cortonese Franciscans finallyassumed control of Santa Margherita (the former San Basilio

(n. 113 cont.)

had held a copy of the text in Rome, it had been made available to all who wanted to useit for preaching; see Legenda, ‘Appendix’, 477–8.

114 This study has not considered the miracle accounts written by Giunta in 1311and appended to the earliest copy of the Legenda, which deserve their own study. It isinteresting to note in passing however that while Cannon has argued that theseaccounts convey that the Cortonese Franciscans and the lay community at SanBasilio were sharing supervision of Margaret’s cult, only one miracle names anyother friars besides Giunta as witnesses, suggesting that the Franciscans were notactive in promoting Margaret’s cult in the decade after her death; see Cannon andVauchez, Margherita of Cortona and the Lorenzetti, 157–8; and Doyno, ‘Lily AmongThorns’, 322–31.




ownloaded from


and location of Margaret’s tomb), Friar Bartholomew of Pisa waswriting the De conformitate vitae Beati Francisi ad vitam DominiJesu, an extensive account of the lives and miracles of his order’smost celebrated members.115 While Bartholomew’s text was notthe first Franciscan text to list the saintly members of the order, itwas the first to include a section dedicated to members of theThird Order.116 What is most striking about Bartholomew’s listis his inclusion of other so-called Third Order saints, for whom,like Margaret, we have no direct evidence of a Franciscan-sponsored cult before the late fourteenth century. Thus inaddition to Margaret, Bartholomew lists Rose of Viterbo (d.1251), the teenage penitent who was exiled for preaching hersupport for the papacy while the city was under EmperorFrederick II’s control, and Lucchese of Poggibonsi (d. 1260),the Tuscan merchant who after the death of his children tookup a strict life of penance with his wife, Bonadonna. Althoughboth Rose and Lucchese seem to have had some association withtheir cities’ friars, the order did not begin to promote either as asaint until the late fourteenth century. Thus in the first years afterRose’s death, it was the priest of Santa Maria del Poggio, Rose’sparish church and burial place, who pushed for a monastery to befounded in her name, provoking objections from the nearbyDamianite convent that had refused admission to Rose duringher lifetime.117 The attempt to ‘Franciscanize’ Rose coincidedwith a second appeal for canonization launched during CalixtusIII’s papacy in the mid fifteenth century.118 The thirteenth-century evidence documenting the creation of Lucchese’s cultin Poggibonsi, moreover, comes overwhelmingly fromcommunal documents, which emphasize the layman’s role as a

115 Bartholomew of Pisa, De Conformitate Vitae Beati Francisci ad Vitam Domini, inAnalecta 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 onthese texts, see Bert Roest, Reading the Book of History: Intellectual Contexts andEducational 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 ofher death seems more to reflect a settlement in the dispute between Santa Maria delPoggio’s priest and the city’s Poor Clares than it does of a Franciscan-led cult sincethere is no evidence that the friars promoted Rose before the fourteenth century. SeeRose Mincuzzi, ‘Santa Rosa da Viterbo Penitente del XIII Secolo’, Analecta TertiiOrdinis Regularis Sancti Francisci 31 (2000), 7–20.

118 Mincuzzi, ‘Santa Rosa’.




ownloaded from


new civic patron.119 Although it seems likely that Lucchese had aFranciscan confessor, who wrote a now lost account of themiracles taking place at his tomb, we have no direct evidencethat the order as a whole worked to promote his cult until thelate fourteenth century, when Friar Bartolomeo de’ Tomei diSiena produced this lay saint’s first vita.120 It is in this vita thatwe first hear the story of Francis of Assisi’s supposed visit toPoggibonsi to make Lucchese and his wife the foundingmembers of his Third Order; a story often repeated in laterbiographies of the saint.121

But Bartholomew also includes lay penitents for whom there isevidence of Franciscan interest in the thirteenth century. What ismost striking in such cases is that these penitents all had tiesduring their lifetimes to either their families or a civicinstitution; associations that would have relieved the friars frombeing these penitents’ primary guardians. Thus, the princessturned penitent, Elizabeth of Hungary (d. 1231) was a memberof 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 onbehalf of both the Sienese commune as well as the city’s mainhospital, Santa Maria della Scala.122 Margaret, Rose andLucchese, however, had all renounced their past identities totake up their new lives of penance. They had organized theirreligious lives outside a family or institutional context; theywere, in effect, crafting their own versions of the vita apostolica.

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 intornoa 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 asparticularly Franciscan saints include Agostino Neri, Vita del Beato Lucchese,terziario francescano (Assisi, 1890); and Francesco Mattesini, Le origini del terz’ordinefrancescano: regola antica e vita del Beato Lucchese (Milan, 1964).

122 The literature on Elizabeth of Hungary is extensive; a good place to begin wouldbe Kenneth Baxter Wolf, The Life and Afterlife of Elizabeth of Hungary: Testimony fromher Canonization Hearings (Oxford, 2011); and M. P. Alberzoni, ‘Elisabetta diTurgingia, Chiara d’Assisi, Agnese di Boemia: note sulla prima diffusionedell’ordine dei frati minori in Germania’, Frate Francesco, lxxiii (2007), 383–417; onUmiliana de’Cerchi, see Benvenuti Papi, ‘In castro poenitentiae’, 59–98; on PierPettinaio, see Luigi de Angelis, Vita del Beato Pier Pettinajo senese del terz’ordine diSan Francesco volgarizeata da una leggenda latin del 1333 per F. Serafino FerriAgostiniano di Lecceto l’anno 1508 (Siena, 1802).




ownloaded from


Thus it should come as no surprise that at the same time that boththe Legenda and the Determinations were expressing the friars’profound ambivalence toward lay penitents, the order itself waskeeping its distance from the cults of lay penitents who had carvedout largely independent lay religious lives.

In creating a set of Third Order saints and claiming connectionswith the same lay penitents the Franciscans had ignored in thethirteenth century, Bartholomew of Pisa performed aneutralizing move similar to that which I have argued we seetaking place in both Giunta’s Legenda and Bargigli da Pelago’stimeline: he encourages his readers to see harmony where therewas 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 ofthe Franciscan order.

My exploration of the relationships between Franciscans andlay penitents makes clear the need to rethink some of the broaderideas scholars have about the friars’ role in and reaction to theexplosion of lay religious enthusiasm in late medieval Europe.While the mendicant presence and growing power within citiesmay have placed the Franciscans in an ideal position to serve asthe arbiters of lay religion, claims for religious prerogative andpower made by someone like Margaret tested their ability toembrace all lay religious enthusiasm. If an unwed mother, whohad once so loved her fine clothes, her jewellery and her ability toflaunt her good looks and powerful lover, could undergo such adramatic conversion experience as to leave her in constantconversation with Christ, was there any need for such arbitersin the first place? And, if the Franciscans regularly usedprovincial inquisitors, such as Giovanni da Castiglione in thecase of Margaret, to organize their interactions with thegrowing population of lay penitents, to what extent were thoserelationships organized around feelings of suspicion and doubt?

With their own religious identity and authority still a relativelynew phenomenon in the late thirteenth century, we can imaginethat the friars may have felt all the more sceptical, suspicious, andperhaps resentful of the many conversion stories and visionaryclaims emerging from the lay population. Although Giunta’srevisions illustrate that the relationship between friar and laypenitent could be one of mutual nourishment, the Legendashould also remind us that the mendicants used their expanding




ownloaded from


role as the guardians of urban lay religious life as an opportunity toassert their authority over, as well as to mark their distinctionfrom, the lay world. Both the Legenda and the Determinationspaint a picture of friars’ ambivalence and antipathy towards apopulation out of which Francis had not only emerged, but alsoseems in his two ‘Letters to the Faithful’ to have wanted to create anew order.123 Despite Francis’ hopes of creating an order ofuneducated laymen, by the mid thirteenth century theFranciscan order had a resolutely clerical and educatedidentity.124 Although this article has not taken up the history ofthe Franciscan Third Order, the friars’ reticence aboutembracing lay penitents offers one explanation for why it tooknearly two generations after Francis’ death for that lay order totake shape.

The late medieval understanding that the vita apostolica wasparticularly available within the lay world marked a profoundshift in the history of Christian piety. Yet this shift came duringa period of significant growth for the institutional church. In sucha context, no matter how apostolic lay religious fervour mighthave appeared, it needed the approval of church authorities tobe deemed both sincere and orthodox. In receiving suchapproval, the friars themselves had lost their lay identity. Is itthen any surprise that those friars would hold penitents such asRose of Viterbo, Lucchese of Poggibonsi and Margaret ofCortona, all of whom had fashioned independent religiouslives, at a distance? The pervasiveness of suspicion and doubtthat I have argued marked the beginnings of Margaret ofCortona’s cult brings into stark relief a fundamental irony oflate medieval history: while the Franciscans were celebrated forexemplifying a lay apostolic spirit, their new authority requiredthem to look with concern and mistrust upon precisely the laymenand laywomen who were pursuing the same ideals that they hadonce championed.

California State University, Sacramento Mary Harvey Doyno

123 For a study of those letters, see Michael F. Cusato, The Early FranciscanMovement (1205–1239): History, Sources, and Hermeneutics (Spoleto, 2009), 153–208.

124 Senocak, The Poor and the Perfect, 21, 24, 41 and passim.




ownloaded from


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

Documents

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