Sorelle Mie: The Sermons of Caterina Vigri and Franciscan Observantist Reform
Caterina Vigri [St. Catherine of Bologna, (1413-1463)] was a Poor Clare novice-mistress and abbess. She is most noted by scholars for her spiritual autobiography, the Sette armi spirituali as well as the biography Specchio d'illuminazione, written by disciple Illuminata Bembo shortly after her death.This leader, recognized for her own sanctity, also composed numerous vernacular sermons to cultivate the holiness of her sisters, members of Clarissan communities at Ferrara and Bologna. Though these didactic addresses were never published during her lifetime, thirty-five are preserved in a manuscript entitled Vita, costumi, morte e miracoli della Beata Catherina da Bologna, compiled by apostolic protonotarius Paolo Casanova in 1606. This dissertation uses Caterina's sermons as well as the Ordinazione (her commentary on the Rule of St. Clare) to examine her role in the Franciscan Observant Reform Movement of the fifteenth century.By explicating how daily spiritual life functioned in Caterina's houses, this project fills a lacuna in the current scholarship on Clarissan reform in Italy. Studies on this movement, where they exist, often focus on broad institutional narratives instead of such quotidian reform activities. These behaviors are crucial, however, because they demonstrate the counter-intuitive truth that women often adopted the strictures of Observance to enhance communal flexibility.While exploring the conversational nature and educational content of Caterina's frequent sermons, this thesis shows that, just like contemporary male Franciscans, Caterina's preaching constituted the core of her Observant identity. The content of this preaching was varied, and drew extensively upon cultural trends outside of the cloister, as is exhibited by Caterina's use of heated anti-Jewish rhetoric, her complex consideration of the animal kingdom, and extensive employment of layered scriptural stories. In providing a detailed analysis of one woman's sermon corpus, this project invites further investigation of how female preaching shaped European intellectual and religious culture at the end of the premodern age.
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