“Women Prophets for a New World: Angela of Foligno, ‘Living Saints’, and the Religious Reform Movement in Cardinal Cisneros’ Castile” (original) (raw)
Related papers
Towards a Critical Edition of the Libro del Conorte of the Abbess Juana de la Cruz (1481-1534)
Observant Reforms and Cultural Production in Europe, B. Roest and P. Delcorno (eds.), 2023
This article constitutes a first effort to organize the materials, reflections and unresolved questions that have emerged from my recent years of study of Juana de la Cruz and the Conorte. If all goes according to plan, this will culminate in both the first critical edition of the text and a monograph on the transcription and collection of her sermons. I would like to offer some preliminary reflections on the material evidence of this case in order to highlight specifically the need for a re-evaluation of the codices containing the Conorte and also of the discourse containing the actual words uttered by Juana. In the first part of the paper therefore, I present the two different manuscripts that include Juana’s sermons and revisit their implications in the history of Juana’s canonization process in order to address certain codicological, philological and ideological issues that need to be urgently re-considered before a hermeneutic reading of the text can take place. In the second part, I try to identify what we understand by the Conorte or, in other words,what we know and do not know about its collective writing, compilation, and use by the community of the Convent of Santa María de la Cruz.
Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies
An exhaustive analysis of the very last words drafted by one of the most powerful noblewomen of the fifteenth century, Duchess Aldonza de Mendoza (d. 1435), reveals that her project to transform the Hieronymite monastery of Lupiana into a pantheon might have been connected to the birth of a child outside her marriage, more precisely, to a son who had remained hidden until the moment of Aldonza’s death. The aim of this study is to offer a new reading of the Duchess’s mausoleum, a pantheon planned to showcase her lineage by focusing exclusively on the female line. Further, this paper rediscovers two panels of the lost main altarpiece of the monastery of Lupiana commissioned by Aldonza de Mendoza and proposes an allegorical portrait of the Duchess represented as the wife of Pontius Pilate. Aldonza’s project reveals itself as crucial for understanding the selffashioning mechanisms employed by late medieval women, as well as the ways in which visual culture was used in the shaping of female memorial programmes.
Al-Masaq, 2015
Winner of the 2018 Best Early Career Article Prize from the Association of Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies There exist a range of crusading sources, often well-known texts, that are currently not being as extensively used as they could be. The Cantigas de Santa María, typically read as a devotional text in praise of the Virgin Mary and descriptive of miracles worked through her intercession, is a central document for understanding crusading mentalities in thirteenth-century Castile. This article will examine three particular characteristics – Mary as intercessor, Mary as warrior, and Mary as missionary – to demonstrate one avenue through which the court of Alfonso X of Castile (r. 1252–1284) projected royal ideas about crusading. Even though much of Alfonso X's crusading efforts came to naught, Alfonso's vision, encoded within the Cantigas de Santa María, is a means through which historians can more fully illuminate the rhetoric of crusade in the thirteenth century.
Religions, 12(3), 223, 2021
In this article, I study in depth the first vita of the Franciscan Tertiary abbess Juana de la Cruz (Vida y fin de la bienaventurada virgen sancta Juana de la Cruz, written c. 1534), examining it as a chronicle that narrativizes the origins and reform of a specific religious community in the Castile of the Catholic Monarchs. I argue that Vida y fin constitutes an account that was collectively written inside the walls of the enclosure that can help us understand themes, motifs, and symbolic Franciscan elements that were essential for the self-definition of its original textual community. I first discuss the narrative of the convent’s foundation and then examine the penitential identity of the community, highlighting the inspiration that Juana’s hagiography takes from the infancy of Caterina da Siena, as described in the Legenda maior by Raimondo da Capua, and analyzing to what extent the represented penitential practices related to the imitatio Christi reflect a Franciscan Tertiary identity in opposition to a Dominican one. Finally, I address the passages in which the hagiographer(s) discuss(es) the sense of belonging to the Franciscan order rather than the Dominicans, and the mystical figure of Francesco d’Assisi as a founder, guide, and exemplar.
Religions, 2020
In this article, I analyze the translation commissioned in 1511 by Cardinal Francisco Ximénez Cisneros of the Life of Catherine of Siena by Raimundo de Capua, which includes the legendae of Giovanna (also known as Vanna) da Orvieto and Margherita da Città di Castello in the light of its translation, commission, and reception in premodern Castile. In the first place, I clarify the medieval transformations of Caterina's text by discussing the main branches of her manuscript tradition and explaining the specificities of the editions authorized by Cisneros in order to know what exactly was printed. In the second place, I put these specificities into the courtly, prophetic context in which those books were published. Finally, I analyze the reception of these editions in the Iberian Peninsula, especially in relation to the figure of María de Santo Domingo, the famous Dominican tertiary.
The aim of this study is the analysis of the earliest hagiographic text concerning the Venerable Leonora Ramirez de Montalvo (1602 – 1659). She founded a number of girls’ conservatories, of considerable importance for the history of the Medici Grand Duchy. As a mystic and writer of religious works, she Mary Magdalene de’ Pazzi of an overview of the hagiographic text concerning Leonora written by Jesuit Father Cosimo Pazzi. The second part of the study will follow a method of textual analysis developed by Romana Guarnieri. She argues that a series of themes (or topoi) can be identified in hagiographies of European women mystics on a comparative basis. Therefore, the application of this method of textual analysis to Leonora’s hagiography will lead to a partial extension to hagiographies of other female mystics, in both the medieval and early modern ages. The last part will show how the model of female saintliness represented by Saint Mary Magdalene de’ Pazzi (1566-1607), which spread throughout Italy during the Counter-Reformation, influenced the hagiographic representation of Leonora.