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This chapter examines public credit and political representation in three European city-states: Cologne, Genoa, and Siena. The goal is to identify the mechanisms at work that determined whether a state had access to credit and at what cost. The chapter considers how public debt was an issue of strong and often violent social conflict within city-states, along with the importance of political control by merchants. The experience of Cologne, Genoa, and Siena shows that there was nothing more effective in ensuring access to credit than being ruled by a merchant oligarchy. Evidence also suggests that when merchant control was challenged, this had negative consequences for access to credit.

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.

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.

This chapter surveys the Italian cities during their principal period of territorial consolidation and/or outreach beyond their own contadi. That occurred in many cases during a time of economic downturn and increasing costs of war, before the demographic crisis of the Black Death. There emerged both regional states (Venice, Milan, Florence) and city‐based dynastic principalities (Este, Gonzaga), as well as condottiere‐signorie in central Italy. A triangular relationship developed between dominant cities, subordinate cities, and the latter's contadi; these did not necessarily regard their former civic overlords as better masters than the regional capitals. Wide variations in the economic and administrative policies of and within the regional city‐states emerged. At the same time, several city‐states survived as independent republics.

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.

The title Prayers applies to a collection of twenty-six prayers, the majority of which date back to Catherine’s last years. Except for the twenty-fifth prayer (the attribution of which is debated), scholars accept the authenticity of all prayers, which are endowed with a significant status among Catherine’s writings.

This essay offers new insights into the civic value and the reception of the Arch of Trajan for Renaissance architecture in Ancona, a city almost completely overlooked by Renaissance historiography because of the destruction of most of its buildings. Built in 115 AD the Arch was meant to celebrate the Emperor’s victory in the Dacian wars, whose fleet departed from Ancona. Looking to sources to be found outside of the city it is possible to examine the legacy of the arch – a monument praised by Sebastiano Serlio and Andrea Palladio, among others -‐ in public and religious architecture, as well as its role in creating the identity of the city. Some motifs from the arch appear already in Giorgio da Sebenico’s late Gothic church portals of S. Agostino and S. Francesco alle Scale, as well as in the Loggia dei Mercanti (late 1450’s, early 1460’s), but its first important depiction is by Pinturicchio in the Piccolomini library in Siena. Here the arch is placed adjacent to Pius II’s, celebrating the (failed) departure of the fifth crusade from Ancona’s harbour in 1464 as a neo-Trajanic enterprise.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This chapter discusses the cult of Pier “Pettinaio” or Pier “the comb-maker” of Siena. Pier lived in Siena until his death in 1289, earning first a pious, and then a saintly reputation for his efforts to follow a rigorous schedule of prayer, to deliver charity to his fellow city-dwellers, and finally to resist the more aggressive commercial practices espoused by other urban artisans and merchants. One sees in Pier's vita how the celebration of a contemporary lay patron became an opportunity to think about the role everyday men and women played in the creation of an ideal civic community. As the vita repeatedly argues, Pier's extraordinary spiritual rigor produced the model of good communal citizenship. But one also sees in this vita an expanded understanding of the content and role of lay charisma. At the same time that the vita celebrates Pier's external actions, it also celebrates his internal focus: his embrace of the contemplative life, his prophetic powers, and his ecstatic states. Thus, in the years immediately before the mendicants took over guardianship and control of the lay penitential life, the cult of a pious Sienese comb-maker demonstrates not only a new equation between the ideal lay Christian and the ideal lay citizen but also an expanded notion of the content and power of lay spirituality.

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.