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Considers the ways in which sanctity is constructed in folklore, hagiography, iconography, and testimony taken during processes for canonization. Detailed analysis elucidates how an unrealized ideal constructed textually serves as the model for aspirants to sanctity, how this prototype becomes a palimpsest as over the centuries new textually constructed lives are embedded, how tautology contributes to perceptions of sanctity, and how true saints are distinguished from impostors. The case material includes saints Catherine of Siena, Mariana of Jesus, and Teresa of Avila, in addition to Rose of Lima.

Female performers exist in a shadowy and illusory state, fashioned as such by our histories. Medieval chronicles systematically exclude women, inhibiting an understanding of them as actors in Metz and beyond. Yet the performing women of the 1468 Catherine of Siena jeu staged an interplay among personal devotion, political affiliation, and gendered notions of urban sanctity; this multiform and yet cohesive undertaking becomes fully visible through the triangulation of new material and familiar narrative evidence. This chapter first uncovers the distorting effects of written histories upon the Saint Catherine actor and constructions of female performance. It then turns to the archives and material culture to reveal the hidden family identity and social status of the actor: the role transformed its player permanently, positioning her as the living symbol of the saint within Metz. The patron, named Catherine Baudoche, also secured a lasting connection to the saint by referencing her personal foundations at the Dominicans. It aligned her with an elite group of regional women who promoted Catherine of Siena through liturgy, architecture, and manuscript illumination. The Saint Catherine jeu thus situates the actor and patron amid a community of practice that depicted women at the forefront of shared devotions to Saint Catherine within the urban, public sphere.

Discusses the wound in Christ’s side as a breast where nourishment and eroticism interact dynamically, including examples from the lives of Catherine of Siena, Maria Maddalena de’Pazzi, Angela of Foligno, and Marguerite-Marie Alacoque, in addition to Rose of Lima. Flames of passion and wounds of love are then analyzed, including Teresa of Avila’s transverberation and the Mercedes graphics produced by Rose of Lima. The chapter concludes with an analysis of mystical marriage, in Rose’s life and generally, as a symbolic complex in which varied strategies of uniting with Christ–inedia, eucharistic devotion, erotic agony, unitive identification, and heart exchange, among others–are integrated into a comprehensive agenda.

Chapter 4 examines theories of stigmatology that emerged during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The works of the Franciscan Bartolomeo of Pisa (d. 1401) and the Dominican Tommaso Caffarini (d. 1434) established categories of stigmatization that provide insight into the devotional, theological, philosophical, and cultural implications of the phenomenon and the place it held in late medieval religious life. In several theological and devotional circles stigmatization could be a diverse experience, far from being a unique miracle related to Francis of Assisi alone. Catherine of Siena emerges as the most charismatic stigmatic of the fourteenth century, whose invisible wounds became the insignia for Dominican reform and female authority. The fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries were crucial moments in the history of stigmatology when a diversity of stigmatic realities was robustly defended and promoted.

This chapter focuses on Catherine of Siena. It criticizes Jacques Lacan’s romanticization of female mysticism, arguing that Catherine’s Dialogue is a carefully crafted exercise in vernacular theology. In critical engagement with Luce Irigaray, and informed by the work of Amy Hollywood, Karen Scott, Suzanne Noffke, and Jane Tylus, it explores Catherine’s Dialogue in terms of gender, language, and desire. It argues that, while sharing the same theological principles as Thomas, Catherine uses the mystical body of Christ as an analogical resource which offers a cataphatic incarnational Thomism. Her rejection of Thomas’s privileging of the contemplative life offers a radical theology of neighbourly love which provides a response to Freud, and her appropriation of a corporeal language of rapture constitutes a bold defiance of the castrating cut of language and ruptures the boundaries of Thomist apophaticism. The chapter concludes with Catherine’s letter to Raymond of Capua where she describes accompanying a dying man to the scaffold.

The General Introduction explains the reasons for a study on Catherine of Siena and specifically on her teaching on discretion. Having set out the plan of her research and the methodological approach the book follows, this Introduction then summarizes the salient events in Catherine’s life, thus setting Catherine’s reflection against its historical context.

This chapter examines the saint-making process of America's first saint, Rosa de Lima. Through a reconstruction of her life story as an ascetic third-order Dominican in Lima and an examination of her canonization process from 1617 to 1691, one can glimpse the often inconsistent observation of rules of sainthood in the century after the Counter-Reformation, which had revised the Catholic Church's guidelines for sanctity. Rosa's choice to remain outside the convent as a lay religious woman and to follow extreme penitential practices reflected a largely unchanged expression of feminine affective piety and undermined the Counter-Reformation's attempts to curb individual spiritual practices and to cloister women.

This epilogue highlights Catherine of Siena (d. 1380). In 1395, the Dominican master general, Raymond of Capua, finally completed the Legenda maior sive Legenda admirabilis virginis Catherine de Senis. This was the culmination of at least a decade of writing by Catherine's last Dominican confessor. Scholars have studied how meticulously Raymond constructed a portrait of Catherine to emphasize the penitential extremes to which she subjected her body, her Christocentric piety, her resolute connection to the Dominican order, and her role as a public prophet. However, in light of the conclusions drawn in this study, one can also see that in Raymond's as well as other Dominican promoters' hands, Catherine's life was not only a means for promoting the papacy during a period of schism as well as encouraging reform of the Dominican Order, but also an opportunity to bring to full fruition the ideas and ideals about what constituted a holy lay life that had developed between the mid-twelfth and fourteenth centuries. As F. Thomas Luongo has argued, the very idea of Catherine—an unmarried laywoman who had a rigorous penitential commitment yet lived outside of a convent—raised a tension that her first Dominican hagiographers were particularly anxious to allay. That tension was essentially the problem of the female lay penitent.

In the spring of 1468, a special jeu – probably taking the form of a theatrical representation in verse – was mounted in the courtyard of the Dominican convent of Metz. This performance portrayed the life of Saint Catherine of Siena, the charismatic urban visionary and reformer who had been canonised just seven years before. Two living women shaped the play, however, both of them also called Catherine: an actor who played the saint, and a patron who sponsored the performance. This event and its female creators point to a richness of female practice in contrast with the old stereotype of the “all-male stage”. This first section thus introduces the historical Catherines who anchor the book as well as the performance methodology used to access their hidden lives and activities beyond the play. It integrates theories of bodily performance with new approaches to patronage, personal devotion, and drama; this enables a broader picture of women’s contributions to late-medieval public life and urban culture. Women’s lives must be studied within a wider social and cultural framework to uncover the full scope of public performance that the Catherines and other women engaged in.

As a disciplinary formation, Medieval Studies has long been structured by authoritative hierarchies and conservative scholarly decorums; the associated fear of error in medieval studies dates back to the Renaissance and the Protestant reformation. In contrast, medievalism increasingly celebrates creative play and imaginative invention. Such invention inevitably produces anxiety about historical accuracy. Popular scholarship and journalism in turn are often attracted to the abject otherness of the Middle Ages, especially the torture practices associated with its judicial systems. Such practices are designed to solicit the truth, and so, like illness, mortality and death, they are a useful double trope through which to analyse the relationship between medieval and medievalist approaches to the past.

Can one attribute to Catherine the writings that go under her name, and can therefore one speak of an authentic concept of discretion attributable to Catherine? As there are no autographs by Catherine, the first question is to ascertain which writings are attributable to her. After briefly examining the uncertain attribution of the Dialogus brevis (“Devout revelation”), the chapter addresses the question whether Catherine knew how to write. The available sources do not allow any definitive answer to this question. What is certain, though, is that between Catherine and her readers there is invariably the interposing presence of the amanuenses to whom she used to dictate. Hence the ensuing chapters analyze the role played by these amanuenses, who were her disciples and secretaries, in the composition of the writings attributed to Catherine.

The Dialogue (or “Book of Divine Providence”) is Catherine’s greatest mystical work, which reflects the spiritual maturity of her thought. The chapter first examines the time and manner of its composition. Was the Dialogue composed in a few days or over a relatively extended period of time? Was it composed while Catherine was in a state of ecstasy, or was it the result of postecstatic dictation? Then, after dwelling on how the Dialogue relates to the Letters and summarizing its structure in light of the manuscripts and Latin translations, the chapter addresses the question of authenticity, concluding with the best literary criticism that the book has a unified character and bears Catherine’s imprint.

Catherine of Siena thought that fire was the best image for describing God’s nature, as well as the longing within her for union with God’s fiery love. Fire, says Bachelard, is both a domestic element (symbolic of warmth, love, and the hearth) and an unruly element (wild, threatening, attacking from without). In alchemy, fire is that catalyst for change. In religious symbolism, it signifies the transformative power of the divine and the flaming passion of human desire. Both can be as dangerous as they are life-changing. The author explores this nature archetype as he backpacks through a recently burned forest in Wyoming. He points the reader to Catherine’s “fire of holy desire” continually burning within her. Fire was her favorite element—full of life, intensity, brilliance, death, and danger. She knew God above everything else to be a fire of love. This is what set her aflame. “If you are what you should be,” she wrote to a friend, “you will set the world on fire.”

This chapter demonstrates the competing claims of Jews and Christians to enjoy a covenant of blood with God through late antiquity. The biblical idea that blood was the link between God and his people found its medieval expression, although blood continued to serve as a memorial of the covenant, as it did in late antiquity. Ashkenazic Jews seemed to believe that the blood of the martyrs was, in a very real sense, God's own blood that cried out to be returned to its source. In this belief they were not far at all from Catherine of Siena's ecstatic immersion in the blood of her God. Far more than she was aware, blood did, indeed, mark the chasm between medieval Jews and Christians, but those on both of its sides spoke a remarkably similar language. Moreover, Jews and Christians became increasingly aware of each other's beliefs and practices and turned these understandings—and, perhaps as often, misunderstandings—of the other into the stuff of polemics, which involved singularly violent language.

The title Letters denotes a collection of 382 letters written between 1370 and 1380 to different categories of addressees, from clergy to religious men and women, from statesmen to friends and relatives. This chapter summarizes the origins of the manuscript collections of the Letters; she then examines their composition, discussing the role of the copyists of the manuscript collections and of the secretaries who took down all the letters in writing from Catherine’s dictation. The conclusion is consistent with that of the leading literary critics, namely, that the Letters as a whole, though not autographical, are substantially authentic and rightly attributed to Catherine.

As in Catherine discretion and prudence are synonyms, this chapter discusses the reflection by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas on the virtue of prudence. This treatment is important to elucidate further Catherine’s concept of discretion and show the spiritual affinity between Catherine and Aquinas. It is also indicative of the fact that the inspiring principles of Aquinas’s doctrine may have reached Catherine through the Dominican environment with which she was familiar in Siena.