"Catherine of Genoa (1447–1510)" -- The Encyclopedia of Christian Literature (original) (raw)
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Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme, 2021
comptes rendus 285 Brown, Jennifer N. Fruit of the Orchard: Reading Catherine of Siena in Late Medieval and Early Modern England. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. Pp. xi, 312 + 4 ill. ISBN 978-1-4875-0407-6 (hardcover) $75. Jennifer Brown's apt title refers to the Orcherd of Syon, the English translation of Catherine of Siena's Libro di divina dottrina or Dialogo, and to the ways in which different readers in England plucked fruit from this or that aspect of Catherine's texts and hagiography. Among Continental saints whose cults were exported to England, Catherine is usually upstaged by the much more prominent Birgitta of Sweden, but Brown's study of the reception of Catherine's writings and texts about Catherine in England seeks to show that there was indeed an "English Catherine of Siena, " (205) and that Catherine and her texts served as a spiritual model for several different strands of English devotional culture in late medieval and early modern England. In order to trace the transmission of Catherine's texts and reputation, Brown focuses on the particularities of manuscripts and early printed books for what they reveal about the tensions and complications of English devotional culture during a time of great ferment and change. Each chapter focuses on one particular text or textual situation, beginning in chapters 1 and 2 with the roles played in introducing Catherine to England and shaping her reception there by two important members of her circle, both with connections in England. Brown traces the key role of Catherine's close follower Stefano (here "Stephen") Maconi, master general of the Carthusian Order, in the diffusion of Catheriniana from the Charterhouse of Sheen and the creation of a model for devotion to Catherine in terms that preempted concerns about her orthodoxy-important given the English church's suspicion of female visionaries and vernacular texts. And she demonstrates how the Documento spirituale of the English Augustinian William Flete, a member of the Augustinian community at Lecceto near Siena and one of Catherine's strongest supporters, circulated in England as The Cleannesse of Sowle and was attributed incorrectly to Catherine herself. Catherine's writings fit into a genre of contemplative literature in which Flete was already well-known, and so her connection to Flete in effect prepared a space for her in English devotional culture.
Specula: Revista de Humanidades y Espiritualidad 3, 2022
This essay begins with the paradox that Catherine of Siena, perhaps the most famous uncloistered religious woman in the Middle Ages, became after her death an authority and model for cloistered monasticism for women during the Dominican reform movement. But the dissonance in the idea of Catherine as a model for cloistered religious women is heightened by false assumptions or oversimplifications of Catherine’s religious status, and of what it meant for Catherine to be a model for this or that form of religious life. This essay surveys Catherine’s letters to religious women, including letters to penitents or mantellate and letters to abbesses and nuns in monasteries. While Catherine’s letters to penitents and other women living in the world focus on the challenges of living without a formal religious rule, her letters to nuns focus on the importance of their maintaining claustration, following their rule, and on the dangers of wealth—a recognition of the generally higher social and economic standing of monastic women. Catherine seems also to identify certain kinds of prayer with monastic life. It is important to remember that Catherine herself founded a monastery, and while it remains unclear what precisely her intentions were for this community, it is another sign of Catherine’s interest in and commitment to cloistered religiosity. The essay concludes by arguing for a more nuanced understanding of what it might have meant for Catherine to be a model for specific forms of religious life.