SOURCE: "'Io Catarina': Ecclesiastical Politics and Oral Culture in the Letters of Catherine of Siena," in Dear Sister: Medieval Women and the Epistolary Genre, edited by Karen Cherewatuk and Ulrike Wiethaus, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993, pp. 87-121.

[In the following essay, Scott concentrates on Catherine of Siena's Epistolario (her letters) as "examples of female activism," arguing that Catherine used her letters as a means of furthering both her religious and political causes.]

It is May 6, 1379. Rome is divided by a civil war into camps supporting two contending Popes, Urban VI and Clement VII. The mercenary soldiers of the Company of St. George have just succeeded in recapturing the Castel Sant'Angelo for Urban VI after a long siege. Soon the Antipope Clement VII will have to flee Rome and establish his court in Avignon.¹ That day Catherine of Siena dictated at least four letters concerning the events of the Schism. She sent two letters to supporters of Urban VI—the city government of Rome and the Captain of the Company of St. George; and she sent two letters to the supporters of Clement VII—Queen Giovanna of Naples and King Charles V of France.² She had been in Rome since late November 1378, called there officially by Urban to help him reunite the Church, and now she was busy doing so through her prayer, her verbal persuasion, and her voluminous correspondence.

Among Catherine's many activities at the time of the Schism, one must count her attempt to bring to Rome a contingent of holy men to assist Urban VI, her exhortation of the college of cardinals in Rome to remain faithful to him, and her desire to travel to Naples to convince Queen Giovanna to support him.³ She sent over sixty letters relating to the Schism, most of them to the protagonists of the conflict. But she had too little time for her plans to bear fruit. Catherine would die on April 29, 1380, worn out by her work for Church unity; the Schism continued well into the fifteenth century.

If the Pope called on Catherine of Siena, an uneducated popolana of the artisan class and a lay Dominican tertiary, for help in the arduous task of ending the Schism, it was because by 1379 she was Italy's most famous holy woman, known not only for her fasts and her visions but also for her active desire to effect political and ecclesiastical reform. In 1376 Catherine had traveled to Avignon to convince Pope Gregory XI to make peace with a League of Italian cities and to return the seat of his government to Rome; with Papal approval she had preached peace in the Sienese countryside in 1377; and in 1378 she had spent several months trying to persuade the Florentines to end their war with the Papacy. By 1379 she had finished dictating the theological masterpiece which she called her Libro or Book, and which later editors entitled Il Dialogo della divina provvidenza (The Dialogue of Divine Providence).⁴ She also had already sent the majority of her 382 letters to prominent politicians, Church prelates, and ordinary people.

Catherine's correspondence is characterized by a combination of didactic content, personal tone, and passionate concern to affect public matters and people's lives. Her prolific writings manifest her wide circle of human relations, her deep caring for temporal peace and ecclesiastical reform, and her desire to present spiritual issues in thoughtful and convincing ways. Through her epistles she hoped to inspire her correspondents to take specific actions. An overview suggests that Catherine's letters might best be analyzed as examples of female activism and raises the question of how she might have obtained such an outspoken and confident voice in public affairs.⁵ This essay argues that the answer to that question lies in the oral culture in which Catherine lived. Significantly, however, recent studies have not emphasized Catherine's actual apostolic endeavors, her self-image as a person called to travel and preach "for the honor of God and the salvation of souls," or her dictation of letters as a means of furthering her political and ecclesiastical causes. Two other interpretations have drawn the most scholarly attention and will need to be examined carefully: first, the letters have been viewed as examples of early Italian literature; and second, they have been considered "prophetic" and "mystical" texts.

The Epistolario as Literature

Because it cannot boast a modern critical edition and has not yet been translated in its entirety into English, the Epistolario is often neglected today as a source for Catherine's life and thought.⁶ This neglect continues a trend in Catherine studies which began in the Renaissance. Since the sixteenth century scholars who have paid attention to her letters have concentrated not on her apostolic activities, but on her place in the development of the Italian language. The key to Catherine's literary reputation is the first printing of the complete Epistolario in 1500 by the influential Venetian humanist Aldus Manutius. Though he did not publish the letters for their stylistic merit, the fact that he had published them at all brought them to the attention of prominent humanists.⁷

By the middle of the sixteenth century Catherine's Epistolario was the only letter collection by a woman to be included in the literary canon set up in Anton Francesco Doni's Libraria, a list of books which he believed a scholarly humanist should have in his private library. Doni listed Catherine's name several times, most notably in the category of writer of "Translated letters" (as if she had originally written her letters in Latin, and then had had them translated into Italian):

Cicerone / Ovidio / Fallaride / Seneca /

Di diversi: Plinio, Petrarca, Pico, Poliziano e altri / San Cipriano / Marsilio Ficino / Papa Pio / Battista Ignazio / San Girolamo / Santo Agostino / Santa Catarina.⁸

By being associated with admired Latin authors from the ancient Roman, early Christian, and Renaissance periods, Catherine acquired the reputation of being a valid and solid literary figure. Her Italian letters could then be appropriated as real stylistic models seminal to the formation of the modern Italian language.

Catherine's inclusion in such sixteenth-century lists of valued letter collections in the vernacular ensured her a prominent place in Italian literary debates. In the early eighteenth century her letters became the focus of an intense controversy in Tuscany, when the Sienese scholar Girolamo Gigli published her complete works and argued in his Vocabolario cateriniano that her Sienese language was superior to the Florentine tongue. This claim brought down on him the wrath of the Florentine Academia della Crusca. The Grand Duke of Tuscany had the Vocabolario banned and burned, and Gigli was forced into exile.⁹

In more recent literary studies, Catherine's letters have attained dubious honor. The Epistolario is included among the earliest examples of vernacular Italian literature—Catherine is still considered the first important woman writer in Italy—and then critiqued and practically dismissed, this time not because of its Sienese dialect, but because of its very "imperfect" style. Beginning with pre-determined literary standards about "serenity" and "harmony," clear structure, stylistic variety, grammatical correctness, and sobriety in the use of imagery and redundancy, scholars such as Giovanni Getto and Natalino Sapegno have found Catherine's prose to be far less "artful" than the "genuine" masterpieces by Dante or Petrarch. For example, Sapegno wrote that her letters were works of political propaganda and mysticism, written with a practical and didactic, and not a valid "poetic" intent. He called her style "strange" and "flowery," "spontaneous," and "colloquial" (dialettale). Typical is his judgment of the imagery Catherine used so often to make her thinking more appealing: "the mystic's glimmering and carnal metaphor is one thing, and the poet's limpid metaphor … is quite another" ("Altra cosa e la metafora fremente, carnale … del mistico, e altra la metafora limpida … del poeta").¹⁰ Paradoxically, then, Catherine's inclusion in the humanist canon both ensured the survival of her letters, considered basic to the development of Italian literary discourse, and led to their discredit because of their lack of poetic quality, their confused style, and their mystical, didactic, and political content.

Although it is important to evaluate the literary quality of early vernacular letters like Catherine's in order to determine their place in the history of the Italian language, the type of analysis proposed by Getto and Sapegno is misleading and anachronistic. What Italian literary critics since the sixteenth century have not considered sufficiently is that Catherine's letters were oral documents dictated by an uneducated and, at best, only partly literate person whose goals were anything but stylistic or literary. Moreover, these scholars have not focussed on the fact that this author was a woman, in fact the only one included in their anthologies of fourteenth-century Italian literature. It has been argued that religious women, whose culture was still predominantly oral, played an important part in the development of the various vernacular literatures of the late Middle Ages, and that their style of writing reflected their particular background.¹¹ For Catherine, the question that needs to be posed is not why her style was so "deficient" and "unliterary", but how this uneducated woman was able to develop her particular kind of style and voice.

Catherine's Voice as Supernatural: Holy Women and Hagiography

Catherine's remarkable success as a writer of letters leads one to wonder what factors enabled her to overcome the many obstacles facing women in Trecento Italy and what factors made possible such an extroverted and active epistolary "career." One often assumes that persons such as herself, an uneducated lay woman of the artisan class, had few opportunities to know about or affect decisively the politics of their commune or the life of the Church. They had no official channels to political or religious power. Confessors advised women who desired holiness to live humbly in solitude or in cloistered communities, to pray, and to do penance. Women were usually not encouraged to make political and ecclesiastical affairs the focus of their spirituality, to preach, or to write.¹² Moreover, the fourteenth century was an age of improved literacy in both Latin and the vernacular. In Tuscan cities schooling was relatively common, and Italian society was increasingly dependent on the written word.¹³ Modern scholars often assume that people who remained illiterate or barely literate functioned with difficulty within this literate and more bureaucratic system. Such an assumption would seem especially true of lay women like Catherine who had much less access to formal education than did men.

How were Catherine and other uneducated women able to find a voice and exert public influence? One answer scholars have given is that the prophetic and supernatural quality of their speech made their words acceptable to their audiences and gave them the courage to act. From this perspective, women in a patriarchal society and church can acquire an acceptable voice and exert power in religious matters only if the words they speak are considered to be God's words and not their own. Such an approach to Catherine tends to minimize her desire to shape Church and state affairs in a practical way and stresses the more narrowly defined ascetic and mystical sides of her life.¹⁴

The interpretation of Catherine which emphasizes the supernatural dimension of her life is based less on an analysis of her letters than on the abundant hagiographical sources for her life, especially the Legenda Major, written several years after her death by her former confessor Raymond of Capua to help bring about her canonization by the Church. It is important to examine the evidence in this Saint's life because it contains important information about Catherine's composition of the letters and because its portrait of her as a mystic prepared for the establishment of her cult. Moreover, though Catherine's self-presentation in her own letters differs significantly from Raymond's stylization of her, as we shall see, it is his view that has most fascinated devotees and recent historians.

In the Legenda Raymond attributes to Catherine a kind of semi-literacy, noting her ability to read certain prayers of the divine office in Latin but not to read ordinary texts or write in Italian or in Latin.¹⁵ His main message is that she was taught all she knew directly by the Holy Spirit and consequently did not attend school or learn anything from teachers or books. Although she worked hard to learn to read in the ordinary way by mastering the alphabet, the task proved impossible. In the context of a story about her custom of walking about her little room praying the Psalms out loud, literally, with Jesus at her side, Raymond inserts an account of how Catherine was miraculously instructed by the Holy Spirit, and learned to "read" the Canonical Hours in Latin "very fast" (velocissime). He specifies that her ability to read the Office was truly remarkable because after the miracle occurred she could still not speak Latin, read by separating syllables, or distinguish the letters.¹⁶ Though Raymond's intent is to stress the miraculous dimension of the event and to reinforce his mystical portrayal of her, and not to give precise information concerning her ability to read, this account leads one to doubt whether Catherine really achieved the skills one normally associates with literacy.¹⁷

In addition, by implying that Catherine did not use her miraculous gifts to peruse books other than the prayers of the Office, Raymond may be hinting that she was unable to read anything she had not heard chanted out loud in a liturgical setting.¹⁸ Another possible interpretation of his remarks is that he is using this story to protect her from a male ecclesiastical audience who assumed that interest in doctrinal matters on the part of uneducated lay women would be easily tainted with misunderstandings and heresy.¹⁹ He wants to make clear that she read out of a desire only to pray better, not to seek special doctrinal instruction or entertainment. Consequently, he implies also, the content of her writing and preaching could not be based on information gained from books but only on divine inspiration.

In his Prologue to the Vita Raymond addresses the issue of Catherine's importance as a writer and affirms that she dictated all her letters with God's direct assistance. The fact that she spoke so quickly and self-confidently and could keep in mind what she wanted to say to three or four secretaries at a time, each taking down a different letter, is a sign to him that her writing was a real miracle:

She dictated these letters quickly and without any interval for thinking, however small; she spoke as if she were reading out of a book placed before her.… Many who knew her before I did have told me that very frequently they had seen her dictating to three or four writers at the same time, and with that same speed and power of memory; for me, that this occurred in the body of a woman so weakened by vigils and fasting points more to a miracle and a super-celestial infusion than to any natural capacity of hers.… ²⁰

Raymond finds Catherine's writings to be especially remarkable and filled with supernatural power because they were dictated effortlessly. Perhaps his awe at her capacity to compose letters so easily reflects his inability, as a highly literate man, to understand the process of oral composition. Catherine may have dictated her letters at the speed of oral discourse, one that was ordinary to her, but too quick to be comprehensible to Raymond, accustomed to the laborious process of written composition. In any case, this account of her dictating letters reveals that Raymond is following a supernatural model of holiness that attributes all of the saint's achievements to God's miraculous intervention. Raymond makes the same point when he expresses admiration that the Epistolario was authored by a holy person so terribly worn down and weakened by ascetic practices. Only divine help could account for the energy she exhibited in the act of dictating so many letters.

Raymond reinforces his emphasis on God by pointing out that it was a mere "woman" who produced these texts. Elsewhere in the Legenda Raymond maintains that though women are "ignorant and fragile by their very nature" ("feminas, de sui natura ignorantes & fragiles"), God sometimes chooses them to ensure the success of His salvific mission. Completely "filled" with God because they are by nature so "empty", these female saints teach divine doctrine and reform the hearts of men, "especially those who consider themselves well-educated and wise" ("potissime illorum, qui litteratos & sapientes se reputant"). These women are "fragile but chosen vessels" ("vasa fragilia sed electa"), "gifted with divine power and wisdom, to confound the temerity [of proud men]" ("virtute & sapientia divina dotatas, in confusionem temeritate eorum").²¹ Raymond emphasizes Catherine's natural female weakness so as to give all the credit for her achievements to God alone.

As a further proof of the divine origin of Catherine's speech, Raymond pays her the very high compliment of saying that if one were to translate her Italian idiom into Latin, her style would be comparable to the Latin prose of St. Augustine and the Apostle Paul. Modern literary critics do not share this view, but it is nonetheless important that Raymond attributes to her words a kind of supernaturally infused literary style which had Latinate qualities.²² Though he may have been the first commentator on Catherine to emphasize the beauty of her style and lead readers to think of her as a literary figure, he does so not in order to attribute her success as a writer to her own natural gifts or hard effort to communicate well, but rather to prove that given her low level of instruction and literacy, only God Himself could have been the author of her letters.

Finally, Raymond states in his Prologue that all Catherine's words were so astonishingly wise for a woman as to constitute a sign that God was speaking through her:

The Lord gave her a most erudite tongue, so that she knew how to utter a speech in every place, and her words burned like flames; and there was no one hearing her who could completely hide from the warmth of her fiery words.… Who from these signs would not see that the fire of the Holy Spirit lived in her? What other proof does one need that Christ spoke in her? … Where did this little woman get such wisdom? … She held the key to the abyss, that is to the depth of supernatural wisdom, and by illuminating darkened minds, she opened to the blind the treasure of eternal light.…²³

Ultimately Raymond links Catherine's success as a writer to the warmth of her spoken words, and not her literary talents. He attributes the effectiveness of those words to the fire of the Holy Spirit and the very power and wisdom of God which lived in this fragile female "vessel."

In the narrative sections of the Legenda Raymond uses accounts of Catherine's effective speaking to reiterate his theology of female weakness and divine inspiration. In particular, he tells a significant story about her preaching at the beginning of the Schism to the Pope and his cardinals in Rome. After listening to Catherine's exhorting them to trust in divine providence and not fear for the future of the Church, Raymond says, Urban VI spoke these words to his cardinals:

"This little woman shames us. I call her a little woman not out of contempt for her, but as an expression of her female sex which is by nature fragile, and for our own instruction. This woman by nature ought to fear, while we ought to be secure: and yet while now we tremble, she is without fear and comforts us with her persuasive words. A great shame must arise in us now." And he added: "What has the Vicar of Jesus Christ to fear, even if the entire world opposes him? The omnipotent Christ is more powerful than the world, and it is not possible that He abandon His holy Church".…²⁴

Raymond does not conclude from the empirical evidence of Catherine's strength that the female nature might not be so naturally fragile as he had been led to believe. Instead, Urban's surprise at Catherine's superb performance as a preacher reflects Raymond's view that a female voice can emerge only if it is totally controlled by the divine. Under such conditions, however, he hints that even Popes may be converted. "Instructed" by her exceptional and miraculous example and words, Urban can now fulfill the properly male and papal role and confidently exhort his cardinals himself. One notes in passing that Raymond implies that Urban's bold speech is normal, not exceptional or supernatural like Catherine's. Though ending the story with the Pope's words may help Raymond assert the dominance of ecclesiastical over charismatic power and highlights Catherine's obedience to the Church, it also underlines her miraculous effectiveness in her mission of humbling, or "shaming" proud men.

Catherine's Letter to the Government of Rome

If one turns from a study of the hagiography to Catherine's own writings and her references to herself as a letter writer and speaker, one finds that she projects a sense of self that is rather different from Raymond's. First, her correspondence shows that being an uneducated woman may very well have been less of an obstacle to her developing a public apostolate and finding a strong voice than Raymond and subsequent historians imagined. Her letters are self-confident and natural, as if advising important people about spiritual, ecclesiastical, and political affairs were the most normal activity for a simple lay woman. Her presentation of self displays none of Raymond's careful apologetic focus. The Epistolario indicates that Catherine was well-informed about the main events of her day and formed opinions about them. When she saw an urgent need to find solutions to problems, she had the courage to speak about what she thought and to send letters to the main protagonists telling them what they should do to bring about Church reform and peace.

Second, though she believed that obeying the divine will was essential in any Christian life, including hers, and though she often expressed gratitude to God for her gifts and achievements, rarely did Catherine give a supernatural or prophetic flavor to her statements about her relationship with Him. The tone of most of her letters is so mundane that they hardly qualify as "mystical" or "literary" texts. Rather, her tone most resembles that of other Italian Trecento letters sent by ordinary people about ordinary things.²⁵ This similarity in tone suggests that Catherine viewed her writing of letters as part of her broader active vocation, which for her was one of ordinary speech and oral communication, and not prophetic or supernatural speech.

Among the letters which Catherine dictated on May 6, 1379, the one she sent to the city government of Rome ("A' Signori Banderesi e quattro Buoni Uomini mantenitori della Repubblica di Roma") is particularly interesting as an example of her epistolary strategy and her degree of involvement in public affairs during the Schism. It shall serve as a starting point for a discussion and explanation of her importance as a writer of letters.²⁶ The letter begins with a set of formulas which recur often, with slight variations, in all of her correspondence: "In the name of Jesus Christ crucified and sweet Mary. Dear brothers and earthly Lords, in sweet Christ Jesus. I Catherine, slave of the servants of Jesus Christ, write to you in His precious blood, with the desire to see you be grateful …" ("Al nome di Gesu Cristo crocifisso e di Maria dolce. Carissimi fratelli e signori in terra, in Cristo dolce Gesu. lo Catarina, schiava de'servi di Gesu Cristo, scrivo a voi nel prezioso sangue suo; con desiderio di vedervi grati …").

After this introduction, Catherine devotes the main part of the letter to a long religious lesson on the spiritual and social consequences of ingratitude and gratitude to God. Her message is relatively simple and straightforward. People who are ungrateful to God, she says, offer the love they owe Him to their own sensuality and turn the love they owe their neighbor into hatred, envy, malicious gossip, and injustice. Deprived of charity, their hearts are so narrow that there is no place for God or neighbor within them. With characteristically blunt and passionate language Catherine accuses the ungrateful person "of contaminating justice and selling the flesh of his neighbor.… Not only does he blaspheme and speak ill of other creatures; but his mouth treats God and His Saints no better nor worse than he might do with his feet" ("contaminando la giustizia e rivendendo la carne del prossimo suo.… Non tanto che bestemmi e dica male delle creature, ma egli pone bocca a Dio e a' Santi suoi ne piu ne meno, come se lo avesse fatto co'piedi").²⁷

On the contrary, Catherine says that people who are grateful to God look to Christ's humility and purity, and to the abundance of blood He shed out of love for humanity, and they broaden their hearts to offer assistance to all.

Such a person lives honestly, helping his neighbor in his need whether he be subordinate or lord, … small or great, poor or rich, according to true justice. He does not lightly believe in a neighbor's failing, but with a prudent and mature heart he examines very carefully who speaks [about that failing] and who the person is that is spoken of [accused]. He is grateful to who serves him: because he is grateful to God, he is grateful to him. And he does not serve only those who serve him, but he loves and is merciful to whoever disserves him.…²⁸

Following this didactic section, the last quarter of the letter shifts in tone to a strongly worded request that the Roman officials apply her general moral principles about gratitude to the situation of the moment, and therefore adopt certain policies. The government, she writes with her firm, almost imperious voglio ("I want you to …"), should recognize that the papal victory is God's doing. Officials should institute public rituals to thank God for saving Rome from danger: they could imitate Urban VI's humble procession barefoot through the streets of the city. The government should also organize better care for the soldiers of the Company of St. George, especially for those who were wounded in the battle for Castel Sant'Angelo, because these men were Christ's instruments and because a show of genuine gratitude would keep these mercenaries on Urban's side.²⁹

Furthermore, Catherine asks the government of Rome to put an end to some negative talk about Giovanni Cenci, the Senator who organized the Pope's victory, and to thank him more fully for his selfless and prudent contributions:

I would not want him or anyone else who is serving you to be treated in this way [with ingratitude and slander], because it would be greatly offensive to God and harmful for you. For the entire community needs wise, mature, and discreet men with a good conscience. No more of this, for the love of Christ crucified! Take whatever remedy your Lordships think best, to keep the simple-mindedness of the ignorant from impeding what is good.…³⁰

Finally, at the very end of the letter, fearing that her words might have sounded too outspoken, and perhaps knowing that in a time of civil war her suggestions would not be popular with everyone in Rome, Catherine suggests that her correspondents ought to listen to her because she is truly disinterested, caring, and sincere. This closing assumes a quite personal tone:

I say this to you for your own good, and not out of self-interest, for as you know I am a foreigner and I speak to you for your good, because I value all of you and him [Cenci] as much as my own soul. I know that as wise and discreet men you will look to the affection and purity of heart with which I write to you. And so you will forgive the presumption, with which I presume to write.…³¹

The letter concludes with a set of formulas which recur very often in the correspondence: "I say no more. Remain in the holy and sweet love of God. Be grateful to God. Jesus sweet, Jesus love" ("Altro non dico. Permanete nella santa e dolce dilezione di Dio. Siate, siate grati e cognoscenti a Dio. Gesui dolce, Gesu amore").³² In her letter to the government of Rome Catherine gives very practical advice and moves from an abstract to a more personal tone.

The Epistolario: An Overview

Catherine's remarkable Epistolario is composed of 382 extant letters dictated and sent to a total of about 220 individuals and 25 groups (governments and religious communities) over the span of about eight years. She engages her correspondents well enough to elicit written answers from some of them and to exchange letters with them over a period of several years.³³ These letters generally follow the pattern exemplified in the one she sent to the government of Rome. An overview of the correspondence allows one to discern the epistolary strategy which Catherine used to persuade people to take the actions she deemed desirable. These letters also carry something of her original voice, and thus they can serve as an introduction to the personality and concerns of the historical Catherine.

The opening formulas ("In the name of Jesus Christ crucified and of sweet Mary" and "I Catherine, servant and slave of the servants of Jesus Christ") indicate that Catherine desires to communicate her views with great authority, both in God's name and in her own. The wording of these formulas is her own, reflecting her Christocentric spirituality and her self-image as loving "servant" to both God and neighbor. These idiosyncratic introductions may function as the equivalent of signatures confirming the authorship of her letters.³⁴ From the very beginning Catherine also creates intimacy with her correspondents by addressing them as her spiritual relatives—as her "sons" or "daughters" if they are her disciples, and as her "mothers" or "fathers" if they are rulers or members of the clergy to whom she must express respect.³⁵

Catherine leaves to a comparatively short end section any mention of the concrete action which she wants to inspire her correspondents to take, and she spends most of each letter teaching in a reasoned and rather impersonal way the spiritual lessons that should persuade them to do as she wishes.³⁶ She structures these didactic sections around a discussion of a main virtue which she wishes her correspondents to understand and practice better—gratitude, charity, obedience, humility, patience, and so on—or a vocation which she believes they need to live more fully—priest, cloistered nun, pope, knight, political leader, son or daughter of God, and so on. Christ is the central model and theological focus of her teaching, and she relies heavily on imagery of all sorts to make her thinking accessible and appealing.³⁷ The moral and doctrinal content of her teaching is conventional, ordinary, and mostly unoriginal. The tone is simple and straightforward—usually not mystical or visionary, theological or philosophical, or stylistically artful.

What is more remarkable about these didactic sections, if one examines the entire Epistolario, is their variety. Catherine has at her disposal a vast repertoire of suggestions and arguments, and her letters advocate and defend many different callings.³⁸ On the one hand, she writes a community of enclosed nuns in Perugia to do everything to avoid social contact: they should flee the parlor, keep to their cell, and converse only with God.³⁹ Likewise she advises a prominent Florentine politician to keep away from the Chancery and the Palace, to refuse any new office, and to stay at home to avoid becoming entangled in the world.⁴⁰ On the other hand, Catherine can portray in glowing terms the heart-warming joys of good conversation among ordinary God-fearing people.⁴¹ Moreover, she spends much energy attempting to persuade prelates to become less reclusive and to pay attention to Church reform. Since the shepherds of the Church are asleep in their own selfishness, she says, they hardly notice that their sheep are being stolen by infernal wolves. So she exhorts one prelate to awake and cry out with a hundred thousand tongues, and she tells a Cardinal to roar like a lion.⁴²

Catherine adapts her spiritual and moral teachings and the imagery she uses to convey her points to her particular audiences. Even her portrayals of Christ can vary: for some correspondents He is the loving bridegroom, while for others He is the immaculate Lamb shedding salvific blood on the cross. He can be a model of humble silence and patience, the spiritual Master, or the eternal Truth and Word of God the Father. This variety reflects Catherine's desire to make her letters personal and unique: she sends her correspondents individually tailored sermons containing those spiritual lessons which she believes they most need to hear or read. The diversity of content in the Epistolario also means that one should be careful not to generalize about her moral and spiritual thought from what she wrote in any one letter.

In the end sections of her letters Catherine abandons the general approach of the didactic portions and applies her theoretical teachings to the particular circumstances of her correspondents. She usually highlights the distinction between the two main sections of her letters by inserting the customary phrase "I have nothing more to say" ("altro non dico") at the end of her lesson. She implies that she is beginning the least formal and most personal portion of her text. Her tone becomes very ordinary and intimate, especially when she deals with matters pertaining to her "family" of spiritual disciples in Siena.

For example, she writes this message to invite her young friend Neri Pagliaresi into her spiritual family: "You asked me to receive you as my son: so though I be unworthy, lowly, and wretched, I have already received you, and I receive you with affectionate love" ("Domandastemi, che io vi ricevessi per figliuolo: onde io, poniamoche indegna misera e miserabile sia, v'ho gia ricevuto e ricevo con affettuoso amore").⁴³ Another disciple, Francesco Malavolti, has left her group and engaged in a life of sin, and she sends him this note: "I write to you with the desire of putting you back in the sheepfold with your companions.… Console my soul; and do not be so cruel to your own salvation as to deny me a visit. Do not let the devil trick you with fear or shame. Break this knot; come, come, dearest son" ("lo scrivo a te con desiderio di rimetterti nell'ovile con li compagni tuoi.… Consola l'anima mia; e non essere tanto crudele per la salute tua, di far caro d'una tua venuta. Non ti lassare ingannare, per timore ne per vergogna, al dimonio. Rompi questo nodo; vieni, vieni, figliuolo carissimo").⁴⁴ Thus Catherine reassures her friends that she loves them and prays for them.

When her friends are ill, imprisoned, bereaved, or suffering economic difficulty, Catherine writes to express affection and consolation. Her advice manifests a certain concern with the practical side of life. For example, she suggests that the sick temper their ascetic practices. She says to Daniella of Orvieto, "If the body is weak and sick, one should not only stop fasting, but also eat meat; and if once a day is not enough, then four times a day. If one cannot stand up on the ground, then one should go to bed; and if one cannot kneel, then one should sit or lie down if necessary" ("Se il corpo è debile, venuto ad infermità, debbe non solamente lassare il digiuno, ma mangi della carne: e se non gli basta una volta il dì, pigline quattro. Se non può stare in terra, stia sul letto; se non puo inginocchioni, sia a sedere e a giacere, se n'ha bisogno").⁴⁵ In other letters, Catherine's desire to assist her friends is reflected in her offer to intervene with the prefect of Rome to ask that he free a prisoner without exacting an enormous ransom, and in her request that friends visit another prisoner.⁴⁶ She begs financial assistance for poor nuns, and she tells a prostitute from Perugia that her brother has promised to support her if she renounces her profession.⁴⁷

Because of her focus on the apostolate, Catherine rarely indicates that it is she who needs assistance, but on a few occasions she does insert short phrases indicating that she misses the companionship of a friend. Raymond of Capua, her confessor and disciple, was the person whose absence caused her most hardship at the end of her life when her attempts to help resolve the Schism were not meeting with success. She suggests in a parenthetical aside that her apostolic work would be easier if he were present: "I, a wretched slave, put in this field where blood is shed for love of [Christ's] blood (and you have left me here, and have gone off with God), will never stop working for you" ("lo vile schiava, che son posta nel campo, ove è sparto il sangue per amore del sangue (e voi mi ci avete lassata, e setevi andato con Dio), non mi ristarò mai di lavorare per voi").⁴⁸ In her last letter to Raymond Catherine expresses again her need for his friendship, but she sets his work for Church unity as a higher priority: "Do not be afflicted because we are physically separated from each other, for though it would be a very great consolation for me [to see you], the joy of seeing the fruit you make in the holy Church is a greater consolation" ("E non pigliate pena perchè corporalmente siamo separati l'uno dall'altro; e poniamochè a me fusse di grandissima consolazione, maggiore consolazione è I'allegrezza di vedere il frutto che fate nella santa Chiesa").⁴⁹

It is usually in these end sections that Catherine discusses events in her own life and places other autobiographical materials, especially issues related to her apostolic activities. In a little less than half of the extant letters (about 160), the end sections show that Catherine's main goal in writing is to persuade her correspondents to take concrete political or ecclesiastical actions.⁵⁰ She sent these letters to advance the great causes which she held dear, such as peace in Italy, a crusade, Church reform, or the return of the Pope to Rome. Many of the letters she wrote between November 1378 and her death in April 1380 reflect her strong desire to end the Schism and her search for practical solutions.

For example, it is with reasoned arguments and outright threats that Catherine begs Urban's supporters to remain faithful and his opponents to return to the fold. She sends her disciples on mission to Genova and Naples. She asks nuns, bishops, and members of confraternities to say special prayers. Catherine suggests that Urban VI create good bishops and keep faithful friends at his side and she sends many letters to convince her more "spiritual" followers and acquaintances to join her in Rome for that purpose. In these sections of her letters, her tone also becomes self-assured and uncompromising. Catherine's individual voice emerges distinctly because she highlights the personal quality of her views with such words as io and voglio.

It is here that she shifts occasionally from offering her strongly opinionated advice to mentioning quite unapologetically her own participation as a protagonist in public affairs, especially her conversations with political and ecclesiastical officials. Particularly significant is her account of her first meeting with Pope Gregory XI in Avignon several years before the beginning of the Schism, when she worked to mediate a conflict between Florence and the Papacy. She writes the Florentines,

I have spoken with the holy Father. He heard me graciously, by God's goodness and his own, showing that he has an affectionate love for peace.… He took such a special delight in this that my tongue can hardly narrate it. After I had talked a good long time with him, at the conclusion of these words he said that if what I had put before him about you was true, he was ready to receive you as his sons and to do whatever seemed best to me… ⁵¹

Catherine usually keeps such autobiographical materials for the end sections of her letters. An important exception to this rule is a series of short narratives about her personal spiritual experiences which she inserts in the didactic portions of some twenty-five of her letters. Significantly, when she discusses these encounters with God, it is usually not to draw attention to her own uniqueness or supernatural powers; instead, her goal is to teach and encourage her correspondents to accomplish whatever they need to do for their own spiritual progress. While Raymond's Legenda highlights all that was miraculous and exceptional about Catherine's life with God, as we saw above, in her letters she describes her own experiences as simple, quite unspectacular dialogues between God and "a soul" or "a servant of God".⁵²

In these dialogues God and Catherine talk about mainstream moral, theological, and spiritual matters. For example, Catherine begins a letter to "a great prelate" with an abstract exposition of the idea that the pain of Christ's desire to save humanity was greater than any physical suffering He endured. Then she inserts this more autobiographical passage to confirm and reinforce her idea:

This reminds me of what the sweet and good Jesus once manifested to a servant of His [Catherine]. She saw in Him the cross of desire and the cross of His body, and she asked: "My sweet Lord, what caused You greater pain, the pain of the body or the pain of desire?" He responded sweetly and benignly, and said, "My daughter, do not doubt.… As soon as 1, the incarnate Word, was sown in Mary's womb, I began the cross of My desire to obey My Father and fulfil His will for man, that man be restored to grace and receive the end for which he was created. This cross brought Me greater suffering than any other physical pain I endured.…"

This conversation continues for several pages. Then Catherine shifts back to the general lesson she wants the prelate to learn:

So you see well, reverend Father, that the sweet and good Jesus Love, He dies of thirst and hunger for our salvation. I beg you for the love of Christ crucified to take the hunger of this Lamb as your object. This is what my soul desires, to see you die from a holy and true desire, that is from the affection and love which you will have for the honor of God, the salvation of souls, and the exaltation of holy Church.… ⁵³

Though Catherine revealed a great deal about herself thoughout the Epistolario, she conveyed above all a strong identification with her varied apostolates. Even when she inserted personal dialogues with God in her letters, she wanted less to explore the intricacies of the self, or to write formal autobiography, than to present the self as a general model and source of encouragement to others. Such an extroverted self-portrait is essential also to Catherine's interpretation of her role as a writer of letters. Further analysis will show that Catherine developed her epistolary voice out of a deep need to communicate to others her experience of God and her views about political and ecclesiastical affairs. She believed that God had bestowed upon her a mission to speak. Undoubtedly the oral culture in which she lived facilitated her practice of that call.

"I Catherine write to you": Writing and Orality

Catherine's letters reflect a late fourteenth-century culture that was aware of the literate world but still essentially and self-consciously oral. Access to the public sphere, in her case, was facilitated by her reliance on an epistolary genre that partook of both the oral and the written. Far from representing a serious obstacle to her apostolate, her lack of education in such a context may well have constituted an advantage. Catherine's oral culture sharpened her capacity for speech and helped her to formulate ideas, opinions, and advice in a blunt, passionate, and articulate manner. Moreover, viewed as the written version of spoken words, letters held many advantages for someone like Catherine who felt a strong desire to influence other people. When her words were dictated to secretaries, they became letters which could reach extended audiences. Finally, such letters constituted an important meeting place of literate and oral cultures. Since both educated and uneducated people in the Middle Ages often dictated their letters, this genre enabled Catherine to enter the public sphere and to communicate with political and ecclesiastical leaders almost on a footing of equality.

Moreover, letters of the sort that Catherine sent were considered so ephemeral by her society as to be uncontroversial; they were personal and private documents, neither threatening nor as legally binding to their recipients, unlike official Latin or Italian epistles.⁵⁴ The private, oral, and momentary nature of Catherine's kind of letter writing was especially beneficial to women, who were forbidden official channels of communication and influence, but who could not be stopped from sending personal messages. Significantly, while Catherine's writings contain important evidence that her travels and unofficial preaching were criticized in her own day, there is no hint that anyone ever questioned her sending of letters, or that she felt the need to defend the legitimacy of her epistolary activities.⁵⁵ Rather, she indicates that dictating her correspondence is an enjoyable and worthy task that is obviously on a continuum with other forms of ordinary speech meant to benefit her neighbors.

In her statements about herself in the Epistolario Catherine specifies some of the ways in which letter writing was personally rewarding for her. Letters allow her "refreshment" ("recreazione") from the labors of the apostolate.⁵⁶ When she is suffering from physical ailments, dictating letters "distracts" her from her pain ("spassare le pene").⁵⁷ After she experiences union with God, writing about what she has learned helps her "unburden her heart" ("sfogare il cuore").⁵⁸ The most common sentiment which Catherine expresses about her motivations for writing, however, is that letters allow her to express love for her neighbor and that God Himself wants her to help save souls and resolve the problems of her day through her correspondence. For example, this is how she justifies the outspoken nature of a letter to the Queen of Naples: "Because I love you, I have been moved to write you, out of a famished desire for the salvation of your soul and body.… Now I have unburdened my conscience" ("Perche io v'amo, mi sono mossa dall'affamato desiderio della vostra salute dell'anima e del corpo a scrivere a voi… Ho scaricata la coscienzia mia").⁵⁹ Catherine's conscience bothered her equally for the Queen's adversary Pope Urban VI. She explains to him that she has written him with such "strong assurance" ("sicurta") because she "was constrained by the divine Goodness, the general need, and the love I bear for you" ("costretta dall divina Bonta, e dal bisogno che si vede, e dall'amore ch'io porto a voi").⁶⁰

Catherine's statements about herself as a writer reflect an apostolic, not a literary sensitivity. The closest she comes to expressing self-conscious pride in her writings is a note in the last letter she wrote as she was dying in Rome, probably in February 1380, to her confessor Raymond of Capua: "I also ask you to get your hands on my Book [the Dialogue] and every other writing of mine that you can find [presumably her letters], and do with them whatever will best serve the honor of God" ("Anco vi prego che il libro e ogni scrittura la quale trovaste di me …; e fatene quello che vedete sia piu onore di Dio").⁶¹ That Catherine wants her works to be preserved and distributed by her confessor and friends reflects her awareness of their value and potential usefulness. But when she states that she hopes to further "the honor of God" she implies that her goal in writing is not literary but religious: she wants her letters to help save souls.

Catherine's lack of formal education ensured that her basic mentality remained that of an illiterate person. Though she was aware of the effects that literacy and study can have on people, Catherine consistently disapproved of these effects or downplayed them. For example, in several letters she delights in the fact that literacy is not a requirement for salvation. Christ crucified is the only "Book" one needs to read, she says. This "Book" was "written" with blood, not ink, and its large illuminated letters [capoversi] are Christ's wounds. The content of this Book is Jesus' virtues of humility and meekness. With such a Book, "who will be so illiterate with so low an understanding, that he will not be able to read it?" ("Quale sara quello idiota grosso, di si basso intendimento che non lo sappia leggere?")⁶²

Likewise, Catherine advises people to prefer the spiritual direction of "a humble and unschooled person who has a holy and upright conscience to that of a proud scholar who studies with much knowledge" ("Unde ti dico che molto meglio e ad andare per consiglio della salute dell'anima a uno idioto umile con santa e diritta coscienza, che a uno superbo letterato studiante con molta scienza").⁶³ Her distrust of formal education is reflected also in her condemnation of excessively rhetorical preaching. In a passage about bad priests in the Dialogue, Catherine writes that God said to her: "Their sermons are set up to please men and give pleasure to the ear, rather than give honor to Me; for they study not a good life, but very elegant speech" ("Le loro predicazioni sono fatte piu a piacere degli uomini e per diletta-re l'orecchie loro che ad onore di me; e però studiano non in buona vita, ma in favellare molto pulito").⁶⁴

The Epistolario provides important evidence that Catherine "wrote" through dictation, and that letters were an oral medium for her. First, her letters name several of her secretaries. In a letter to the Podesta of Siena, she says: "My female companions who used to write for me are not here now, and so it has been necessary for me to have Frate Raimondo write" ("Non ci sono ora le mie compagne che mi solevano scrivere: e però è stato di bisogno che io abbia fatto scrivere a frate Raimondo").⁶⁵ At the end of a letter to her disciple and friend Stefano Maconi, her secretary of the moment adds: "May the negligent and ungrateful writer be recommended to you" ("II negligente e ingrato scrittore ti sia raccomandato").⁶⁶ Many other letters include similar greetings, often somewhat humorous and self-deprecating, which name Catherine's friends who served as her secretaries: "Alessa grassotta" (fatty Alessa Saracini), "Cecca perditrice di tempo (Francesca the time waster), "Giovanna Pazza" (crazy Giovanna Pazzi), "Francesco cattivo e pigro" (naughty and lazy Francesco Buonconti), "Neri del quattrino" (wealthy Neri Pagliaresi), and "Barduccio cieco" (blind Barduccio Canigiani).⁶⁷

Second, some of the language which Catherine uses at the end of her letters to soften her reproofs of church prelates reflects the fact that she was writing with her tongue and her mouth—that is, that she was dictating. In a letter to Pope Urban VI a few months before her death she refers to her mouth: "Forgive me, most sweet and holy Father, if I say these words to you.… Do not despise or disdain them because they come out of the mouth of a most unworthy woman" ("Perdonatemi, dolcissimo e santissimo Padre, che io vi dica queste parole. Confidomi, che l'umiltà e benignità vostra è contenta che elle vi sieno dette, non avendole a schifo nè a sdegno perchè elle escano di bocca d'una villissima femmina").⁶⁸ In a cryptic message of a letter to Raymond of Capua concerning the beginning of the Schism and her opinion of Urban VI, she uses an odd mix of language about the mouth and the hand: "Now keep silent, my soul. I do not want to try my hand, dearest father, at saying that which I could not write with a pen or say with my tongue; but let my being silent manifest to you what I want to say" ("Or tieni silenzio, anina mia, e non parlare più. Non voglio mettere mano, carissimo padre, a dire quello che con penna non potrei scrivere nè con lingua parlare; ma il tacere vi manifesti quello ch'io voglio dire").⁶⁹ Catherine's wording shows that writing for her was simply a form of speaking.

Third, she views her letters as the written record of an oral discourse of hers which will be delivered orally to her correspondent by a messenger or carrier.⁷⁰ She asks Raymond of Capua to "announce to the Pope what I write in this letter, as the Holy Spirit will inspire you to do" ("annunziategli quello che io vi scrivo in questa lettera, secondo che lo Spirito Santo vi ministrerà").⁷¹ Her Sienese disciple Sano di Maco receives a letter containing her request that he "read this letter to all my children" ("Voi prego, Sano, che a tutti i figliuoli leggiate questa lettera").⁷² Catherine sends Stefano Maconi a note telling him to read two other letters she had enclosed, to give them to their addressees, that is, to the Government of Siena and to the members of a confraternity, and "to speak to them fully about this matter which is contained in the letters" ("Parla loro pienamente sopra questo fatto che si contiene nelle lettere").⁷³ In all these cases the written text is actually an oral medium, a means for her message to travel from her mouth to her friend's ear.

Fourth, for Catherine the writing of letters was really a form of speech, in continuity with other kinds of words which she believed God called her to utter, and that is, informal preaching and prayer. At the beginning of the Schism she writes Pope Urban VI about what she sees as the three components of her vocation: "As long as I live, I shall never stop spurring you on with my prayer, and with my live voice or my writing" (lo non mi resterò mai di stimolarvi coll'orazione, e con la voce viva o con scrivere, mentre che io viverò").⁷⁴

Finally, Catherine said to many of her correspondents that she would have preferred direct oral discourse with them to dictating and sending written letters to them. For example, during the Schism she writes King Charles V of France, "It is love for your salvation that makes me say these things; I would much rather say them to you with my mouth and with my presence than in writing" ("L'amore della vostra salute mi costringe a più tosto dirvele a bocca con la presenzia, che per scritta").⁷⁵ "Let it not seem hard if I sting you with words, for it is the love of your salvation which has made me write you", she says to three schismatic cardinals. She then adds, "I'd rather sting you with my live voice, if God were to allow me to do so" ("Non vi parrà duro se io vi pungo con le parole, che l'amore della salute vostra m'ha fatto scrivere; e più tosto vi pungerei con voce viva, se Dio m'l permettesse").⁷⁶ Letters were only a poor substitute for the warmth of the human voice. Catherine clearly believes that her action would be far more effective if she could visit Urban VI's opponents, see their situation first hand, and address them directly with whatever tone and advice they seemed to need most.

Catherine's emphasis on speech brought her to reflect a great deal on the power and the morality of words, her own and those of her contemporaries. In her view words carry power, not because God grants supernatural effectiveness to the words of a few chosen individuals, but because words which represent strong personal emotions are always effective and persuasive. For her this is as true of the words of sinners as it is of the words of saints. For example, she attributes much of the urban violence she witnessed around her to the inflammatory power of hateful speech. God tells her: "As a result of words you have seen and heard of revolutions, the destruction of cities, and many evils and murders. For the word entered the center of the heart of the person to whom it was said; it entered where the knife could not have passed" ("Per le parole avete veduto e udito venire mutazioni di stati, disfacimento delle città e molti altri mali e omicidi; perchè la parola entrò nel mezzo del cuore a colui a cui fu detta: intrò dove non sarebbe passato il coltello").⁷⁷ Insults such as "You are a brute animal" cause an escalation of anger: "One word seems like a knifing, and if they do not answer with four words, they feel their heart will explode with poison!" ("Una parola gli pare una coltellata; e se essi non ne rispondono quattro, pare che il cuore scoppi veleno!").⁷⁸ "Sometimes this gives birth to injurious words, and these words are often followed by murder" ("Alcuna volta partorisce parole ingiuriose, dopo le quali parole spesse volte seguita l'omicidio").⁷⁹ In Catherine's experience, evil words almost inevitably lead to evil consequences.

Likewise, words that are good and holy cannot fail to pierce and convert the heart of their listeners. The key to holy words is their speaker's sincerity and godliness of purpose. Catherine explains that a sincere and open heart is one which "everyone can understand, for it does not demonstrate one thing on the face and the tongue, while it has another thing inside" ("Ogni uno el può intendere perche non dimostra una cosa in faccia e in lingua, avendone dentro un'altra").⁸⁰ The "voice of the heart" is as effective a force for good as words of hatred are a force for violence and murder. When Catherine writes to the Romans that they should listen to her words because of the "affection and purity of heart with which I write to you" she is really expressing her trust that her letter will bear good fruit in the souls of those who hear it.⁸¹

Catherine's model for the power of good speech is the Apostles after Pentecost. As she writes to a Dominican preacher, "When the fire of the Holy Spirit came upon them, they climbed into the pulpit of the holy cross, and there they could feel and taste the hunger of the Son of God, and the great love he had for us; and so the words came out of them like a fiery knife out of the furnace, and with this warmth they pierced the hearts of those who listened" ("Perche il fuoco dello Spirito Santo fu venuto sopra di loro, essi salsero in su'l pulpito dell'affocata croce, ed ine sentivano e gustavano la fame del Figliuolo di Dio, e l'amore che portava all'uomo: onde allora escivano le parole di loro, come esce il coltello affocato dalla fornace; e con questo caldo fendevano i cuori degli uditori").⁸² Catherine explains the Apostles' success as preachers through the power of their deep identification with Christ's salvific love for humanity. The fire within their hearts becomes a fire potent enough to pierce through all obstacles in the hearts of their audience. Such is the fire which she wants her Dominican correspondent to communicate through his holy words.

Catherine does not believe that God gives this fire only to priests, however. She calls Mary Magdalene apostola and discepola, and she identifies personally with Christ's male and female apostles.⁸³ This apostolic fervor is echoed in a letter which she wrote her mother in 1377 to defend her own informal preaching mission in the Sienese countryside. Catherine asked her mother to treat her with the same understanding which Mary showed her Son's Apostles after Pentecost: "The disciples, who loved her without measure, actually leave joyfully and sustain every pain [of the separation] to give honor to God; and they go among tyrants, bearing many persecutions.… You must know, dearest mother, that I, your miserable daughter, have not been put on earth for anything else: my Creator elected me to this" ("I discepoli che l'amavano smisuratamente, anco, con allegrezza si partono, sostenendone ogni pena per onore di Dio; e vanno fra i tiranni, sentendo le molte persecuzioni.… Sappiate, carissima madre, che io miserabile figliuola, non son posta in terra per altro. A questo m'ha eletta il mio Creatore").⁸⁴ Fortified by the example of the Apostles, Catherine too is willing to travel, preach to the "tyrants" of her day, and bear many "persecutions," for she is convinced that it is her vocation to utter relentlessly earnest, passionate, and ultimately persuasive words.

Catherine's approach to speech provides the key to how she explained her success as an apostle and a writer of letters. She is convinced that if one's words are inspired by a sincere and humble desire to obey the promptings of the Holy Spirit and to help bring salvation to souls, then one's speech cannot fail to effect good. For Catherine this holds true for all kinds of speech: oral discourse is especially effective, but letters are influential to the degree that the power of her original voice dictating those words can be transmitted onto the written page. Moreover, this power and influence are present not only in the exceptional words of a few saints, but also in the ordinary words of all kinds of people, including Popes, ordained priests, politicians, and even well-intentioned lay women like herself.⁸⁵

Conclusion: Women and Oral Culture

It is Catherine's trust that her sincere words would bear fruit in the hearts of her various audiences that propelled her, a woman, into the public sphere as a writer of letters, and that explained, at least to her satisfaction, whatever measure of influence and success she enjoyed in her apostolic work. This understanding of herself is significantly different from the portrayal of her in the hagiographical literature. One recalls that Raymond of Capua emphasized the supernatural quality of her life, including the miraculous components of her writing letters, in order to defend her sanctity as an ignorant and weak female vessel completely filled with divine power. Her being a woman was one of the issues which concerned Raymond the most. Though this view of Catherine may reflect how many of her contemporaries explained the impact of her voice and why they were willing to listen to her, it does not explain how she became confident enough to speak, because this was not her self-understanding.

Catherine did not focus on whatever might have been exceptional in her life. Her main desire was to love her neighbor and advance her various political and ecclesiastical causes through ordinary written and oral speech. Perhaps the most significant characteristic of her approach is her silence about the fact that she was a woman engaging in these activities. Catherine does not mention even once in the Epistolario that her apostolate was controversial because of her gender. Among the social categories she discusses, male and female distinctions have no place. She does not reflect on what a female "nature" might be: if she believes herself to be a sinner in need of divine mercy and assistance, she does not attribute her failings to a particularly "female weakness." Though it is known that at the time of the Schism she suggested a mode of life somewhat like her own to at least one other woman, she did not found a religious community of female activists.⁸⁶ Unlike her near contemporary Christine de Pizan, Catherine did not feel the need to defend the female sex from attack in any way.⁸⁷

Why did Catherine not talk about herself as a woman? Faced with the paradox of an influential activist woman who did not write about gender, one must conclude that she was relatively indifferent to gender, and that God and the success of her apostolic causes mattered to her more. It is likely that Catherine's oral culture was one reason for that indifference. The feminist consciousness of a writer such as Christine de Pizan arose out of a clearer awareness of the classical and medieval intellectual tradition of misogyny than Catherine could ever have achieved. Christine begins her Book of the City of Ladies by describing herself seated in her study and in a state of considerable discomfort because she perceives that throughout history so many learned men have insulted women in their books. Her interest in defending women comes from the realization that they have been unjustly attacked. Catherine may have been less vulnerable to negative views of women because she was not used to reading books. Her lack of education may have shielded her from the more virulent and debilitating theories of misogyny prevalent in her time. Instead, she saw other urgent needs in her world and her Church, and she spoke her mind about them in a manner which was very much her own creation.

Notes

¹ For an analysis of the events of the Schism and Catherine's participation in them, see Arrigo Levasti, S. Caterina da Siena (Turin: U.T.E.T., 1947), pp. 414-500; Giles Meerseman, "Gli amici spirituali di S. Caterina a Roma alla luce del primo manifesto urbanista," Bulletino Senese di Storia Patria 69 (1962): 83-123; Andre Vauchez, "La saintete mystique en Occident au temps des papes d'Avignon et du Grand Schisme," in Genese et debuts du Grand Schisme d'Occident: Avignon, 25-28 septembre 1978 (Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Historique, 1980), pp. 361-68.

² The edition of Catherine's letters that I have used here is Le Lettere di S. Caterina da Siena, ed. Piero Misciatelli (Florence: Giunti, 1940), 6 vols. The letters Catherine sent on May 6, 1379 are numbers 347, 348, 349 and 350, in Lettere, vol. 5, pp. 165-87. All translations in this paper are my own.

³ In addition to Catherine's letters, one can find much information about her activities during the Schism in her main vita, Raymond of Capua's Legenda Major. This text is published under the title of De S. Catharina Sensensi virgine de poenitentia S. Dominici, in Acta Sanctorum Aprilis, vol. 3 (Antwerp, 1675), pp. 853-959. A recent English translation of the Legenda is The Life of Catherine of Siena, trans. Conleth Kearns (Wilmingon, DE: Michael Glazier, 1980).

⁴ S. Caterina da Siena, n Dialogo della divina provvidenza ovvero Libro della divina dottrina, ed. Giuliana Cavallini (Rome: Edizioni cateriniane, 1980). The most recent English translation is The Dialogue, trans. Suzanne Noffke (New York: Paulist Press, 1980).

⁵ For a full presentation of the evidence, see Karen Scott, "Not Only With Words, But With Deeds: The Role of Speech in Catherine of Siena's Understanding of Her Mission" (Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1989).

⁶ A modern critical edition exists only for the first eighty-eight letters which Catherine sent between the early 1370s and the end of 1376: S. Caterina da Siena, Epistolario, ed. Eugenio Dupre Theseider (Rome: Tipografia del Senato, 1940). This volume has been translated recently into English: The Letters of Catherine of Siena, trans. Suzanne Noffke (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1988). Antonio Volpato of the University of Rome is currently working to complete Dupre Theseider's critical edition.

⁷ Amadeo Quondam, "Dal 'Formulario' al 'Formulario': cento anni di 'Libri di lettere'," in Le "carte messaggiere." Retorica e modelli di comunicazione epistolare. per un indice dei libri di lettere del Cinquecento (Rome: Bulzoni, 1981), pp. 13-156, esp. p. 60. See also Carlo Dionisotti, Gli umanisti e il volgare fra quattro e cinquecento (Florence: F. Le Monnier, 1968), pp. 3-5; and Gabriella Zarri, "Le sante vive. Per una tipologia della santita femminile nel primo Cinquecento," Annali dell 'Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento 6 (1980): 408-9.

⁸ Anton Franceso Doni, La Libraria, ed. Vanni Bramanti (Milano: Longanesi, 1972), p. 195. Doni also included Catherine's letters and the Dialogue in another list of titles, inthe category of texts available in the vernacular: La Libraria, pp. 208, 210. The only other female writers mentioned in that second list are Angela of Foligno, Tullia, Olimpia, Terracina, and Isabella Sforza. For a short study of Doni's work, and Catherine's mention in it, see Quondam, "Dal Formulario," p. 59.

⁹L'Opere di Santa Caterina da Siena, nuovamente pubblicate da Girolamo Gigli (Siena, 1707-1726). The Vocabolario cateriniano constitutes volume 5 of Gigli's work. See Augusta Theodosia Drane, The History of St. Catherine of Siena and Her Companions (London: Longmans, Green, 1915), p. xviii.

¹⁰ N. Sapegno, II Trecento (Milan: Vallardi, 1966), p. 495; Giovanni Getto, Saggio letterario su S. Caterina da Siena (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1939).

¹¹ An early study of the link between vernacular writing and women is Herbert Grundmann, Religiose Bewegungen im Mittelalter (1935); see also the Italian translation Movimenti religiosi nel Medioevo (Bologna: il Mulino, 1974), esp. Ch. 8. For an illuminating discussion of stylistic aspects of medieval women's writings, see Elizabeth Alvida Petroff, "Introduction" to Medieval Women's Visionary Literature (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 3-59.

¹² There is a growing historiography on women, politics, and religion in late medieval Italy. See for an example Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985). For a review of the literature see Scott, "Not Only With Words" (note 5), pp. 117-25, 139-48.

¹³ Recent studies of the growth of Italian literacy include Franco Cardini, "Alfabetismo e livelli di cultura nell'età comunale," Quaderni storici 13 (1978): 488-522; Peter Burke, "The Uses of Literacy in Early Modern Italy," in The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy: Essays on Perception and Communication (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 110-31; and Paul F. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300-1600 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).

¹⁴ Though Catherine's historical significance as an activist and writer has not been explored in depth in recent historical scholarship, her life has usually been subsumed under the category of prophecy and visionary activity. For example, Rudolph Bell, Anna Benvenuti Papi, Caroline Bynum, John Coakley, Richard Kieckhefer, and Andrè Vauchez have recently noted Catherine's extreme fasting, rigorous ascetic practices, and mystical religious experiences, and have used them to explain how she gained fame as a holy woman: see Rudolph M. Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 22-53; Anna Benvenuti Papi, "Penitenza e santitá femminile in ambiente cateriniano e bernardiniano," in Atti del simposio internazionale cateriniano—bernardiniano, Siena, 17-20 aprile 1980, ed. Domenico Maffei and Paolo Nardi (Siena: Accademia senese degli intronati, 1982), pp. 865-78, esp. 872; Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 165-80; John Wayland Coakley, "The Representation of Sanctity in Late Medieval Hagiography: The Evidence from Lives of Saints of the Dominican Order" (Th.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1980); Richard Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984); and Andrè Vauchez, "Les Reprèsentations de la saintetè d'aprés les procés de canonization medièvaux (XIII-XVe siècles)," in Convegno internazionale. Agiografia nell'occidente cristiano, secoli XIII-XV, Roma (1-2 marzo 1979) (Rome: Accademia nazionale dei lincei, 1980), pp. 31-43.

¹⁵ Like Raymond of Capua, Catherine's second most important hagiographer Thomas Caffarini believed that she miraculously learned to read and dictated her letters. However, unlike Raymond he stated that toward the end of her life Catherine learned to write in her own hand through a further divine miracle. He limited this claim, though, by stating that she herself had written only two letters, the concluding part of the Dialogue, and a prayer, and thus by implying that on the whole she continued to function most comfortably within her oral culture. See II Processo Castellano, ed. M.-H. Laurent, Fontes Vitae S. Catharinae Senensis Historici, vol. 9 (Milan: Bocca, 1942), pp. 51, 62; and Libellus de Supplemento: Legenda prolixe virginis Beate Catharine de Senis, ed. Giuliana Cavallini and Imelda Foralosso (Rome: Edizioni Cateriniane, 1974), pp. 77-79. Caffarini's views may be based on Catherine's L. 272, in Lettere, vol. 4, p. 172.

¹⁶Legenda, p. 881, col. 1: "Verum, quia mentio facta est hic de psalmodia, scire te, lector, volo, quod virgo haec sacra litteras quidem sciebat, sed eas homine viatore docente nequaquam didicerat: & dico literas, non quod sciret loqui Latinum, sec scivit legere literas & proferre." Unable to learn to read in an ordinary way, Catherine asks God for a miracle: "Antequam de oratione surgeret, ita divinitus est edocta, quod postquam ab ipsa surrexit, omnem scivit litteram legere, tam velociter & expedite, sicut quicumque doctissimus. Quod ego ipse dum fui expertus, stupebam: potissime propter hoc, quod inveni, quia cum velocissime legeret, si jubebatur syllabicare, in nullo sciebat aliquid dicere: imo vix literas cognoscebat: quod aestimo pro signo miraculi ordinatum a Domino tunc fuisse" (Legenda, p. 881, col. 1-2).

¹⁷ Overall, the story sounds similar to the achievement of small children who have heard their parents read stories to them so often that they memorize the words and can pretend to read as they recite what they know by heart.

A further indication that Raymond considered Catherine's Latin literacy weak is the fact that though she could "read" Latin in that particular way, she could not use this language fluently for prayer, writing, or direct speech. Throughout her life, he said, she loved to repeat the prayers which begin the divine Office, but she did so not in Latin but in the vernacular. See Legenda, p. 881, col 2: "Verbum psalmi, per quod quaelibet hora incipitur, scilicet: Deus in adjutorium meum intende, Domine ad adjuvandum me festina: quod in vulgari reductum, frequentius repetebat." Raymond also mentioned that when Catherine visited Avignon to speak with Pope Gregory XI in 1376, he had to serve as her interpreter because she spoke no French or Latin: Legenda, p. 925, col. 2 and p. 956, col. 2. He did not comment at all on any ability of hers to read or write Italian.

¹⁸Legenda, p. 881, col. 2: "Coepit libros quaerere divinum Officium continentes, & in ipsis legere psalmos, hymnos, & reliqua quae pro canonicis Horis sunt deputata."

¹⁹ See Grundmann, Movimenti religiosi, pp. 156, 281; and comments by Jean Gerson quoted by Caroline Walker Bynum, "Jesus as Mother and Abbot as Mother: Some Themes in Twelfth-Century Cistercian Writing" in Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 134-35.

²⁰Legenda, "first prologue," p. 854, col. 2.

²¹ See Legenda, p. 883, col. 1-2. For an analysis of the place of these passages in the Legenda as a whole, see Scott, "Not Only With Words", pp. 161-81. For the view that medieval interpretations of women viewed their "natural" vulnerability and weakness as the female avenue to power and strength, see Bynum, Holy Feast, and Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom. St. Hildegard's Theology of the Feminine (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987). 1 shall argue below that Catherine did not share Raymond's or Hildegard's "theology of the feminine."

²²Legenda, First Prologue, p. 854, col 2: "Quamvis enim proprio sermone vulgari loquatur in eis, quia non cognovit letteraturam: quia tamen introivit in potentias Domini cum clavi profunditatis profundae, stylus eius (si quis diligenter advertit) potius videtur Pauli quam Catharinae, melius alicujus Apostoli quam cujuscumque puellae"; and "Sententiae sunt tam altae pariter & profundae, quod si eas in Latino perceperis prolatas, Aurelii Augustini putes potius fuisse quam cujuscumque alterius."

²³Legenda, p. 885, col. 1.

²⁴Legenda, p. 937, col. 1-2. Raymond also discusses Catherine's desire to travel to Naples to persuade Queen Giovanna to support Urban VI. His intent in describing her activities during the Schism may be to portray her life as a model for the vita apostolica. He mentions that her group of followers in Rome lived together in voluntary poverty, and "chose to travel and beg with the holy virgin" ("eligentes magis cum sacra virgine peregrinari & mendicare"; Legenda, p. 937, col. 1.) He gives no hint that such a mode of life involving mendicant itinerant preaching was controversial for lay women and men in his time; he may have had in mind the observant reform he was promoting among friars as Master General of the Dominican Order at the time he was composing the Legenda. For Raymond's use of Catherine's life to promote the Urbanist Papacy and his own observant reform, see Coakley, "The Representation of Sanctity," pp. 86-90.

There is another interesting account of Catherine "preaching" to men. Raymond writes that at some unspecified time the prior of the Carthusian monastery on the island of Gorgona, near Pisa, invited her and some twenty companions to come to the island and speak to his monks. The entire community walked to the lodging where she and her female companions (socia) were staying. The prior "cunctos Fratres duxit ad eam, rogans aedificationis verbum pro filiis.… Tandem aperuit os suum, & locuta est prout Spiritus sanctus dabat …" (Legenda, p. 927, col. 1).

²⁵ For example, see the letters published by Lodovico Zdekauer in his Lettere familiari del Rinascimento senese (1409-1525) (Siena, 1897) and Lettere volgari del Rinascimento senese (Siena, 1897); Le Lettere di Giovanni Colombini, ed. Dino Fantozzi (Lanciano, n.d.); "Le Lettere di Margherita Datini a Francesco di Marco," ed. Valeria Rosati, Archivio storico pratese XLX (1974): 4-93.

²⁶ L. 349 in Lettere, vol. 5, pp. 219-25. This is one of the few letters of the Epistolario which is dated. The rubrics which are found in the first letter collections and were printed in the first editions indicate also that the letter was dictated while Catherine was in a state of ecstacy: "A di 6 Maggio 1379. In astrazione fatta."

²⁷ L. 349, p. 177.

²⁸ L. 349, p. 178.

²⁹ L. 349, pp. 178-79. Raymond of Capua suggests in the Legenda that Urban's decision to walk barefoot in a procession of thanksgiving was due to Catherine's direct influence: see Legenda, p. 940, col. 1.

³⁰ L. 349, pp. 179-80.

³¹ L. 349, p. 180.

³² L. 349, p. 180.

³³ Catherine indicates that she is answering a letter from a correspondent in sixty-six of her letters. She mentions receiving sixty-nine letters from a total of fifty different people or groups of people. Her politically prominent correspondents were Pope Gregory XI, Niccolò Soderini of Florence, Bernabò Visconti the Duke of Milan, Queen Giovanna of Naples, and the governments of Siena and Bologna. None of the letters which Catherine mentions having received is to be found among the four extant letters which were sent to her (by Tommaso Caffarini, Bernabò Visconti's daughter-in-law Elizabeth of Bavaria, the Prior of the Carthusian monastery of Gorgona, and the Abbot of Monte Oliveto); see Lettere, vol. 6, pp. 45-53.

³⁴ Catherine's formula is her original variation on the ordinary salutation one finds at the beginning of other Trecento letters: "In God's name. Amen" ("Al nome di Dio. Amen"). The formulas with which she ended all of her letters are similarly her own.

³⁵ On the epistolary form as it was used in the Middle Ages, see Giles Constable, Letters and Letter Collections, Typologie des sources du Moyen Âge occidental, fasc. 17 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1976); and James J. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages. A History of Rhetorical Theory from St. Augustine to the Renaissance (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 194-268. For late medieval Italian letters see Nicola De Blasi, "La lettera mercantile tra formulario appreso e lingua d'uso," Quaderni di retorica e poetica 1 (1985): 39-47. In contrast to most medieval writers of letters who used their opening salutations to emphasize the differences in social level of their correspondents, Catherine kept her opening salutations very simple.

³⁶ Though the content of Catherine's didactic sections is conventional and similar to that found in letters by other religious figures of the Middle Ages, both men and women, the division of each letter into two distinct parts—general and personal—and the ordered structure of the didactic section seem more idiosyncratic.

³⁷ For example, self-knowledge and humility are a "treasure" one should "buy" and "possess." One should dwell in the "shop," "cavern," "cell," "house" of self-knowledge and love of God. Humility is also one's "armour" and "sword" in the "battle" against spiritual "enemies"; or it is "clothing," a "belt," a "pin." Humility is the charity's "wetnurse" or "mother"; self-knowledge "feeds" the "hungry" soul. It is a "deep abyss," or a "fertile" "ground" upon which all the virtues are "planted." For a "dictionary" of Catherine's imagery, see Gabriella Anodal, Il linguaggio cateriniano (Siena: Edizioni Cantagalli, 1983).

³⁸ For examples of how Catherine's spiritual advice can differ from one letter to another, see Karen Scott, "La tolleranza religiosa nel pensiero di Santa Caterina da Siena," Nuovi studi cateriniani 2 (1985): 97-111; and "La pratica della tolleranza religiosa da parte di S. Caterina," Nuovi studi cateriniani 3 (1987): 5-26.

³⁹ L. 217 in Lettere, vol. 3, p. 257.

⁴⁰ L. 258 in Lettere, vol. 4, pp. 96-97.

⁴¹ L. 190 in Lettere, vol. 3, p. 143.

⁴² L. 16 in Lettere, vol. 1, pp. 54-56; and L. 177, vol. 3, pp. 92-93.

⁴³ L. 99 in Lettere, vol. 2, pp. 117-18.

⁴⁴ L. 45 in Lettere, vol. 1, pp. 180-182.

⁴⁵ L. 213 in Lettere, vol. 3, p. 233.

⁴⁶ L. 89 (XIV) in Lettere, vol. 6, p. 36; and L. 254, in Lettere, vol. 4, p. 82.

⁴⁷ For letters about poor nuns, see L. 88, 129, 170, 198; L. 276 is addressed to the prostitute from Perugia.

⁴⁸ L. 344 in Lettere, vol. 5, p. 155

⁴⁹ L. 373 in Lettere, vol. 5, p. 292.

⁵⁰ An even greater proportion of Catherine's letters than this probably contained practical suggestions for political or ecclesiastical action. It is known that some of her early editors cut out the more practical end sections of the letters and published only the moral and spiritual lessons which they considered more useful for the general religious edification of the faithful. It would be a mistake to conclude from this that the early editors substantially altered the content or the wording of those sections of Catherine's letters which they did publish, for the evidence is that they left the didactic lessons intact.

To reconstruct Catherine's political and ecclesistical activities from her Epistolario is not an easy task. Unfortunately for modern scholars, most of her letters were probably not dated: only three of the eight originals are dated. However, even when dates were originally included, they were usually placed at the end of the end sections, and thus some dates were probably cut out. See Robert Fawtier, Sainte Catherine de Sienne: Essai de critique des sources, vol. 2 (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1930), Ch. 7-8.

Five of the original letters are preserved in Ms. T.III.3 of the Biblioteca Comunale of Siena: L. 298, 320, 319, 329, and 332. The other letters are preserved in a Sienese Confraternity (L. 365); at the monastery of San Rocco in Arcireale (L. 192); and at Saint Aloysius church in Oxford. This last letter is not numbered; Robert Fawtier published it in "Catheriniana," Mélanges d'archeologie et d'histoire 34 (1914): 31-32.

⁵¹ L. 230 in Lettere, vol. 3, p. 312.

⁵² Significantly, Catherine uses a very similar dialogue form to convey important theological and spiritual insights in her masterpiece called, appropriately, the Dialogue of Divine Providence.

⁵³ L. 16 in Lettere, vol. 1, pp. 52-53.

⁵⁴ The fact that only eight of Catherine's original letters survived may reflect the difficulties of the Trecento postal system, as well as the private nature of such an epistolario.

⁵⁵ See below for examples of Catherine's response to criticism of her itinerant preaching.

⁵⁶ L. 373 in Lettere, vol. 5, p. 291.

⁵⁷ L. 119 in Lettere, vol. 2, p. 190.

⁵⁸ L. 272 in Lettere, vol. 4, pp. 171-72.

⁵⁹ L. 312 in Lettere, vol. 5, p. 14.

⁶⁰ L. 364 in Lettere, vol. 5, p. 251.

⁶¹ L. 373 in Lettere, vol. 5, p. 291.

⁶² L. 309 in Lettere, vol. 4, p. 294. See also L. 316 and 318. Catherine's letters show that though she is aware the Christian Scriptures are actually written texts, the Bible she is familiar with is the oral text proclaimed and preached in church. She knows the provenance of certain phrases: "Taste and see" ("Gustate et vedete") comes from the Psalter, and "Come beloved bride" ("Vieni, diletta sposa mia") is part of the Song of Songs ("Cantica"). She has heard of the Old Testament ("Testamento vecchio"). She mentions the "Gospel" quite often, and she notes once that St. Paul communicated in "letters" ("pistola") (Dialogo, XI, p. 27). Still, for Catherine Scripture mostly takes the form of short pithy sayings; she does not comment on long Biblical texts or differentiate among the evangelists as writers. She is interested in what Jesus said, or in what God's trumpeter ("banditore") Paul said, not in where and how those spoken words were written.

⁶³Dialogo LXXXV, pp. 194-95. Significantly, two centuries later the literate Teresa of Avila would advise the opposite to her nuns. See The Life of Teresa of Jesus. The Autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila, trans. E. Allison Peers (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1960), Ch. XIII, pp. 144-47.

⁶⁴Dialogo CXXV, p. 316.

⁶⁵ L. 135 in Lettere, vol. 2, p. 257.

⁶⁶ L. 320 in Lettere, vol. 5, p. 60.

⁶⁷ I have counted over thirty letters with probable references to secretaries. The question of how much these men and women influenced the content of Catherine's letters as they took her dictation or made clean copies of the texts is important and difficult. They certainly controlled details of spelling and punctuation, and it is likely that they inserted something of their own here and there. But they also revered Catherine as their spiritual teacher, and they would have felt that altering her words was sacriligeous. The opening and closing formulas bear Catherine's personal mark; her style and use of imagery are equally idiosyncratic. Overall, the letters do seem to convey Catherine's voice.

⁶⁸ L. 370 in Lettere, vol. 5, p. 272.

⁶⁹ L. 330 in Lettere, vol. 5, p. 87.

⁷⁰ In some cases Catherine entrusted the carrier with an oral message that was too important to be written down. See L. 295 in Lettere, vol. 4, p. 243: "Lasso questo e l'altre cose dire a Cristofano."

⁷¹ L. 267 in Lettere, vol. 4, p. 147.

⁷² L. 294 in Lettere, vol. 4, p. 239.

⁷³ L. 368 in Lettere, vol. 5, p. 265.

⁷⁴ L. 364 in Lettere, vol. 5, p. 252.

⁷⁵ L. 350 in Lettere, vol. 5, p. 187.

⁷⁶ L. 310 in Lettere, vol. 4, p. 306.

⁷⁷Dialogo, p. 217.

⁷⁸ L. 318 in Lettere, vol. 5, p. 52.

⁷⁹Dialogo, p. 15.

⁸⁰ S. Caterina da Siena, Le Orazioni, ed. Giuliana Cavallini (Rome: Edizioni cateriniane, 1978): Orazione III, p. 88.

⁸¹ L. 349 in Lettere, vol. 5, p. 180.

⁸² L. 198 in Lettere, vol. 3, p. 172.

⁸³ Karen Scott, "St. Catherine of Siena, 'Apostola'," Church History 61 (March 1992): 34-46.

⁸⁴ L. 117 in Lettere, vol. 2, p. 185.

⁸⁵ See also Sharon Farmer, "Persuasive Voices: Clerical Images of Medieval Wives," Speculum 61 (1986): 517-43.

⁸⁶ L. 316 in Lettere, vol. 5, pp. 37-41.

⁸⁷ Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards (London: Pan Books, 1983).