One winter's night after a long illness, the Roman noblewoman Margherita Colonna attended mass and entered deeply into prayer. The chapel where she prayed had been supported through generations of her family's endowments and alms, and provided space as a burial ground for her deceased relatives. While she had prayed there many times during her recovery, this night ended with a life-altering vision. After kneeling, she felt herself overcome by the Holy Spirit and a sensation of reverence filled her heart. As she beheld the priest holding up the eucharist, a white dove flew above the host and hovered there.Footnote 1 After this experience, she was inspired to perform great works of piety. She donned penitential clothing and began visiting chapels and hospitals, depositing alms and restoring family churches along the way. Having consecrated her virginity to Christ, she spent her dowry establishing a female religious community, where her kinswomen and others from her circle resided until her death in 1280.
Although inspired by Francis of Assisi, Margherita practiced a form of piety that differed from the asceticism, mysticism, and strict voluntary poverty preferred by radical Franciscan holy women. As a noblewoman, she had far more resources at her disposal to endow Colonna churches and give copious alms to the poor. Voluntarily adopting poverty posed a challenge to women of her social station, one that she chose not to answer. In fact, Margherita's lives demonstrate that within her social class, Franciscan piety did not conflict with elite practices such as founding convents and bestowing alms on family churches. Although her relatives did not see her canonized in their lifetime, Margherita's lives are central to answering why and how her baronial family understood and practiced Franciscan spirituality.
The medieval sources pertaining to Margherita Colonna are very few in number, as are the modern studies devoted to her. Her two vitae were intended to further her canonization case at the court of Pope Nicholas IV (1288–1292), who at that time favored the Colonna. Her brother Giovanni, a layman and senator of Rome, wrote the first life, which portrayed her as an urban saint and a giver of alms. Stefania, a cloistered Clarissan abbess who succeeded Margherita as head of her spiritual community, wrote the second.Footnote 2 Neither vita was written by a male cleric, and both works present Margherita as a more traditional type of saint than other female followers of Francis. The few historians who have studied Margherita have noticed the tensions inherent in her life and cult, pointing out that she was caught between familial obligations and Franciscan spirituality. For instance, Lezlie Knox has observed that Margherita followed a more traditionally monastic vocation than more radical Franciscan female saints, and suggested that she only called herself Franciscan to please her family, who protected and promoted the Order.Footnote 3 Likewise, Giulia Barone argued that Margherita appears so unique because her piety represented the worlds of both the court and the cloister.Footnote 4 While both studies establish that Margherita was a family saint, neither goes so far as to contrast Colonna piety with radical Franciscan women.
Rather than considering Margherita's lived sanctity, this article investigates how hagiographers, both male and female, structured a saint's biography to promote their own agendas, choosing and omitting details of a holy life as they saw fit.Footnote 5 Women's vitae are especially problematic; in hagiography written by clerics, holy women often played a passive, subordinate role, making it hard to know anything about their true saintly motivations. Once a woman died, her reputation was no longer in the hands of her female spiritual companions, but left up to the men who supported her canonization case at the Roman curia. Nonetheless, saints' lives written by men about women still provide valuable information about the world of medieval saint making. Male hagiographers offered a masculine view of feminine piety, a perspective that must be kept in mind when attempting to demonstrate gendered notions of medieval sanctity. Points of conflict between the saintly female subject and the male writer become useful nodes of understanding the complex relationship between saint and hagiographer. On the other hand, one cannot study Margherita's cult without also considering the perspective of her second hagiographer, a nun. The abbess Stefania was her successor in the institution Margherita founded at Palestrina, and so framed her vita with specific motivations in mind, such as the need to legitimize her order to hostile onlookers, and to demonstrate her intimate familiarity with her saintly subject.Footnote 6 Stefania's vita reveals Margherita's role within their shared Clarissan cloister, and thereby offers a counterpoint to Giovanni's attempts to fit Margherita's piety within a masculine and courtly framework.Footnote 7
In contrasting Giovanni's life with Stefania's, I will test the extent to which traditionally monastic spirituality, associated with dynastic territorial expansion and consolidation of patrimonial wealth, persisted in an age known for mendicant holiness. To achieve this end, I will consider why particular virtues, such as almsgiving, asceticism, humility, and poverty, were stressed or omitted in the two lives of Margherita Colonna. The religious life of the Colonna court differed from that of thirteenth-century Italian communes.Footnote 8 Aristocrats practiced almsgiving and endowed churches around Rome, as they did throughout Italy, and continued to do so even after radical mendicant poverty gained popularity.Footnote 9 This fact, however, did not mean that the two spiritual forms conflicted. Rural elites, including Margherita's family, continued to endow family houses associated with the Franciscans, treating the Order's institutions like traditional monasteries. Margherita's lives exemplify this comingling of newer and older forms of piety. Nonetheless, as I will demonstrate, these works did not originate in the radical Franciscan spirituality of Clare of Assisi, but in the traditional monastic religiosity practiced by Margherita's aristocratic class.
I. Patrimony, Piety, and Alms in Roman Baronial Society
Biographical information found in the first vita, written by Margherita's brother Giovanni, demonstrates how Colonna family concerns shaped the construction of Margherita's sanctity. Furthermore, considering Margherita's saintly virtues in the context of the Colonna baronial court reveals Giovanni's pious expectations of his sister. According to his vita, Margherita was born to a Colonna father and Orsini mother, two families that were frequently at odds during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. She lost her father shortly after her birth, and remained in the custody of Giovanni.Footnote 10 After rejecting a profitable marriage with a nobleman, Margherita fled the family palace at Palestrina to escape the temptations of court. She retired to the hermitage of Castel San Pietro, built on a mountain behind her childhood home, and there welcomed an entourage that included other Colonna women, mendicant friars, and her brother Giacomo Colonna, Cardinal of Santa Maria in Via Lata. After her death at the age of twenty-four, her community moved to the Roman convent San Silvestro in Capite. The Colonna had recently acquired the convent with the intention of allowing two warring branches of the clan to send their daughters there.Footnote 11 Soon thereafter Honorius IV officially granted Margherita's spiritual sisters the right to live as Franciscan nuns.
By the end of the thirteenth century, the Colonna achieved prominence among local Roman elites; they became the preferred military arm for the papal curia during the papacies of Nicholas III and Nicholas IV. These popes rewarded the family's loyalty with ecclesiastical benefices, territory, and administrative positions throughout papal lands. By the time Margherita Colonna opted for a religious life, her family was arguably the richest, most powerful, and most influential family in central Italy, holding territories far beyond Rome's walls. The Colonna's superior political position, and Margherita's canonization case, abruptly ended in 1297, when Pope Boniface VIII Caetani, another Colonna enemy, began a formal crusade against the family, declaring them all heretics and violating Margherita's shrine in Rome.Footnote 12
Before this political disaster, however, the Colonna were involved in collecting information about their saintly relative. Giovanni Colonna (1235–1292) compiled his vita between the years of 1281 and 1285 while his sister's life was still in fresh memory.Footnote 13 Throughout his vita, Giovanni extolled three virtues in particular: Margherita's humility, nobility, and almsgiving, which carried specific connotations related to class, gender, and piety in the thirteenth century. Exploring the relationship between these three qualities makes clear that Margherita's social standing was an integral part of her sanctity. In his account, she exhibited qualities desired in a noblewoman: generosity, filial piety, and adherence to the patriarchal social order. Regarding her Colonna origins he wrote, “Margherita came from a noble Roman family, yet her father, not long for this world, hurried to heaven, so that bereft of one parent, she was raised by her mother (who died not much later) and brothers.”Footnote 14 In this respect, Margherita's early years resembled hagiographic accounts of young female saints also orphaned from birth, or in some way destined for a life lacking earthly paternal protection and without a father to arrange an appropriate marriage.Footnote 15 Giovanni imagined Margherita's orphan status as a saintly virtue. She exhibited humility from birth, which she continued to practice as an adult. However, this form of humility differed from many of her Franciscan female contemporaries, and can only be understood within Margherita's baronial social class.
Giovanni conceived of humility in a way that did not conflict with the baronial sensibilities of Francis's noble supporters. A similar form of noble humility appears throughout the life of Isabelle Capet (1225–1270), sister of Louis IX of France and founder of the sorores minores inclusae—the female Franciscan rule that Urban IV officially recognized in 1263, and that Margherita Colonna's followers adopted for themselves. In Agnes of Harcourt's life of Isabelle of France, humility, not poverty, was the virtue the nobility ought to embrace because it indicated an avoidance of excessive pride in one's lineage, ostentatious dress, or inappropriate penances.Footnote 16 In Giovanni's life of Margherita, too, humility indicated a perpetual state of spiritual poverty rather than actual voluntary impoverishment. Margherita preferred to spend her time alone, rather than in the company of her family at court. She dressed plainly and showed little interest in her noble lineage. To Giovanni, this behavior demonstrated external humility, a virtue that contained a specific socio-religious meaning, indicating a form of Franciscan spirituality preferred by women of her family.Footnote 17 Of her daily activities he wrote:
The virgin heard scripture with pleasure, and at that time she would willingly stow away in order to revisit it in private; her soul was completely penetrated by the word of God as if by a sword and from that point on afterwards she decided to consecrate her virginity to God and serve him in all humility.Footnote 18
After depicting her social background, Giovanni mentioned that from an early age, Margherita demonstrated humility rather than excessive pride in her lineage. To Giovanni, her choice to seek solace in private contemplation did not indicate that she rejected her natural family, but that her service and devotion to God did not conflict with her dutifulness to paternal figures, both living and deceased.
Giovanni's shifting attitudes toward Margherita's voluntary celibacy and rejection of marriage show how saintliness, economics, and politics converged in hagiographical writing. Although Giovanni at first disagreed with Margherita's rejection of marriage, his sister soon won him over. In Margherita's social world, a male guardian, either one's father or husband, controlled a woman's property, including her dowry. Equipped with an impressive dowry and Colonna properties in Rome and Palestrina, Margherita would have made a great match for any Roman baronial suitor. As her guardian, Giovanni attempted to arrange a marriage for her and wrote that eligible men came in droves, hoping to win the hand of the young Colonna maiden. She remained unimpressed with the prospect of marriage, preferring to retire to her quarters, take up the study of scripture, and pray in private. Margherita soon declared her choice to remain a virgin, and named Christ her heavenly bridegroom. Needless to say, her brother disapproved of this choice. He sent two Dominican friars to argue with her on theological grounds that her duty as a pious noblewoman was to marry, form family alliances, and produce a male heir, like so many of her kinswomen had done before her.Footnote 19 Margherita's response to the Dominicans, as depicted by Giovanni, demonstrated that she would follow the path of religion, which could be understood in terms of baronial marriage practices. According to Giovanni, she told the friars that, “while other barons and vassals provide for [their] women, she herself would only marry the only Son of the King.”Footnote 20 Margherita clung to her calling, and in time won out against her brother's demands. In the end, Giovanni praised her virginity, stating that it demonstrated inner nobility. Although this action might appear contradictory, as Margherita's decision seemed to go against expectations for women of her class, Giovanni's acceptance of her virginity resembled attitudes held by other baronial patriarchs. There were also practical reasons for not pushing Margherita into an alliance with another baron, as keeping her at home and encouraging her to give alms to family churches, hospitals, and convents kept her dowry within family ecclesiastical holdings. This inheritance tactic allowed the Colonna to accumulate wealth rather than sharing it with competing families. The strategy coincided with increased numbers of baronial men and women entering Roman convents, a tendency recalling traditional monastic practices.Footnote 21
After accepting her decision to not marry, Giovanni began to portray her almsgiving as an expression of her nobility and humility. He described Margherita performing her virtues in the world, giving alms and endowing family churches until her death. Through almsgiving, Margherita not only avoided the excessive pride that threatened less pious noblewomen; she also served the sick and the poor. She did not serve just any person in need, however, but only those who were morally deserving as well as financially needy, and especially members of the “shamefaced” poor, elites who had fallen on hard times and were too ashamed of their social position to ask for alms. Margherita would act the part of the beneficent landlord by offering loans with no or little interest, but only to those who were too humbled or shamed by their condition to ask.Footnote 22 These actions were also performed indirectly, indicating a style of piety differing from the Italian penitent women of the communes who would often embrace lepers and the poor in showy displays of charitable favor, even those who did not belong to their kin group. Instead, Margherita served the deserving poor with alms; and she did so discreetly, so as not to embarrass the recipients of her charity. She thus spent her patrimony and inheritance in a way that impressed, rather than angered, her natural family.Footnote 23
This form of almsgiving fit into broader pious patterns also practiced by Roman baronesses. When wealthy women gave to family churches, they were ensuring prayers for themselves and their ancestors and directing funds into appropriate channels. Baronial women were expected to support their families through pious bequests, as seen in examples of surviving wills left by women. Through a will, women could leave their dowries to their female kin, thereby keeping wealth within the family and ensuring that their descendants could enter into profitable marriages. Such bequests could be in the form of immoveable property, household furniture, or other goods. Alternatively, wealthy Roman women often left large sums of money to family chapels or to convents where their kinswomen lived as nuns. For instance, in 1361 Mabilia Orsini left a sum of money and half of her goods to her daughter Perna, a nun in the Roman Clarissan convent of San Lorenzo in Panisperna.Footnote 24 Mabilia's desire to support her family convent was considered an appropriate form of feminine piety, and would have been seen as a continuation of loyalty toward one's surviving relatives. Baronial women continued the affective relationships they had formed in life through their wills, something that was both expected and praised. In depicting Margherita as an endower of churches, Giovanni Colonna praised her virtuous femininity, because good women, along with pious men, directed patrimony to their kin. Furthermore, when elites gave a gift, they expected it to perpetually pay off in prayers for their families.Footnote 25 Men and women intended to improve the state of their souls by endowing churches and other ecclesiastical properties, another traditional elite pious practice.
In addition to reinforcing kinship lines after death, pious endowments and alms helped to establish space where a baronial family could practice piety freely without interference from hostile enemies. In Giovanni's view, Margherita accomplished this through strengthening Colonna ties to a particular landscape. Giovanni described Margherita's desire to join the Clarissan convent at Assisi, but reported that an illness prevented her from fulfilling this desire. As a compromise with her guardian, she decided to found a convent closer to Palestrina, settling on an ancient shrine dedicated to the Virgin Mary at Mentorella. Unfortunately for Margherita, the Conti family, Colonna enemies, owned the territory where the shrine was located. When she visited the shrine to survey the site of her future convent, Conti nobles began to attack her entourage for trespassing on their land.Footnote 26 Not wishing to push the matter further, Margherita settled for Castel San Pietro, located on Colonna territory, as the permanent home of her religious community. Like her pious female relatives, Margherita moved among familiar social spaces, the domestic sphere of the rural family fortress and worldly urban churches and estates.Footnote 27 In this way, she continued to pursue her religious vocation so as to not interfere with her family's territorial interests or aggravate their rivals.
Along with demarcating sacred space for family use, Colonna interests included maintaining their longstanding relations with the Franciscan Order.Footnote 28 The family traced this connection back to Francis himself. When Francis stayed in Rome, he was often the guest of Matteo Rosso Orsini, the uncle of Margherita, Giacomo, and Giovanni Colonna; Matteo Rosso's son (and Margherita Colonna's cousin) Giovanni Gaetano Orsini became a patron and protector of the Franciscans both as a cardinal and later as Pope Nicholas III.Footnote 29 Younger Colonna sons who were not heirs joined the Order in large numbers, as did younger Colonna women. After Margherita's convent was transferred to Rome, San Silvestro in Capite grew incredibly wealthy through the large endowments left to it by Colonna men and women who wished to send their daughters to the convent. For instance, in his will dating to 1290, Pietro Colonna de Gallicano left part of his estate to San Silvestro where his daughters were Clarissans.Footnote 30 The Colonna ability to make calculated political maneuvers one day and grant generous endowments to pious institutions the next featured prominently in Giovanni's construction of Margherita's piety. His vita depicts a woman who excelled at consolidating Colonna wealth, protecting family assets, and strengthening relationships with the Franciscan Order. To Giovanni, Margherita helped her family by leaving behind a rich monastery and legitimizing the family name through her generosity.
An analysis of Giovanni's vita reveals two trends tied to social expectations of Roman women. First, Giovanni represented Margherita as adhering to traditional monastic forms of religious life that did not conflict with wealth and power, and he did so within a Franciscan framework. Margherita integrated her noble background and natural family into her piety and used her dowry as an extension of Colonna patrimonial concerns with her guardian's permission. She granted alms after judging the inner moral character of those around her. For these reasons, her worldliness seems very out of step with the original call to poverty made by Francis and Clare, who both embraced rigorous poverty in spirit and in practice. Nonetheless, Giovanni's depiction of Margherita cohered with his family's preferred form of piety. Giovanni argued that both Francis and Christ cherished Margherita's piety, and he commended the nobility in blood and spirit that would be necessary to maintain such a balance. He tells us: “she did not swerve from the moderate and royal road that Christ had followed.”Footnote 31 In taking the moderate's path, she followed the very footsteps of Christ. His construction of Margherita's piety, founded on nobility, humility, and almsgiving, demonstrates his attempt to merge Franciscan values with traditional views toward pious gifts.
Second, in Giovanni's telling, Margherita endowed family churches, preserved the family name through founding a Colonna community of sisters to which one could bequeath alms, dowries, and patrimony. Margherita appears as a conventional Roman noblewoman interested in preserving Colonna material and spiritual interests—a true familial saint who exhibited only positive noble qualities. While he was interested in promoting Margherita as a family saint, Giovanni chose to concentrate on Margherita's worldly acts rather than her life in the convent. His choice to depict her life in the world indicates that he wished to exalt her generosity, her humility, and her familial loyalty above any mystical teaching she may have given to her female companions. His hagiographic choices must be seen in the context of his social and religious milieu. In extolling moderation, Giovanni simultaneously supported norms for Roman noblewomen approved by Roman noblemen. In endowing Colonna churches and founding Colonna convents, Margherita showed that she understood her brother's attitudes toward almsgiving and put them into practice. However, this piety contrasted sharply with the flamboyant asceticism, harsh self-mortification, and rigorous poverty practiced by the radical penitent women that his family also supported.
II. Colonna Men, Pious Patronage, and Female Franciscan Saints
The aristocratic spiritual practices performed by the Colonna also imbued the family's relationships to radical Franciscan women whom they patronized. Giovanni Colonna's representation of his sister Margherita adheres to expected Roman baronial gender roles, especially when compared to radical Franciscan women who rebuked patronage from rich and powerful men from Giovanni's social class. Giovanni's Margherita appears as a dutiful, obedient, and pious Roman woman even though she remained celibate and rejected motherhood. She eschewed excessive penitence and poverty, and her hagiographer-brother supported and honored her noble humility. Other Italian Franciscan women made more radical choices, in the face of less supportive families. For instance, when she opted for a strict religious life, the family of the Florentine holy woman Umiliana de' Cerchi (1219–1246) took away her dowry. After the death of her husband, her father demanded that she remarry, as forging an alliance with another, more established, Florentine family would help the Cerchi secure a place in urban politics. Umiliana's dowry served as social cement, solidifying the loyalty of one family to another. However, she refused to remarry, having taken a vow of sexual continence for the remainder of her life. In reaction to her disobedience, Umiliana's father resorted to a civil suit against his daughter to reclaim her dowry. No longer able to draw on patrimonial support for her almsgiving, she could not support the poor as before and therefore was resigned to beg from rich Florentine women.Footnote 32 The difference between the conflict experienced by Umiliana and the familial acceptance given to Margherita Colonna had to do with the recipients of each of their alms. Margherita Colonna gave to the “shamefaced” poor, but spent most of her dowry rebuilding Colonna institutions. Umiliana, on the other hand, gave to complete strangers, and throughout her life was generally not interested in supporting her natural kin in any way. Her activities angered her paternal guardian, who approved of pious almsgiving only if the woman in question was married and generally obedient to her family. If one had a dowry to spare, it could be given away only within a familial framework and with male approval. Social restrictions seriously limited women drawn to radical Franciscan poverty, making it nearly impossible to do so without attracting reprobation, violence, or civil suit.
Though radical Franciscan women rejected copious amounts of alms, Margherita Colonna's first vita demonstrates that Roman barons felt no conflict in giving alms and property to their communities. After the death of Margherita Colonna, powerful Colonna and Orsini men became great supporters of Margherita of Cortona (1247–1297), Clare of Montefalco (c.1268–1308), and Angela of Foligno (c.1248–1309). These unlikely relationships revolved around two conflicting pious practices, receipt of alms and adherence to poverty. When Giacomo Colonna attempted to endow the convent founded by Clare of Montefalco, she refused to accept alms for her community. Giacomo Colonna arranged for Clare's convent to receive some gold florins in exchange for prayers of indulgence. However, Clare had a very different attitude toward almsgiving than the Colonna brothers. The sisters who testified during her canonization proceedings recalled how she urged them not to receive any monetary donation on behalf of their convent, because, as she saw it, prayers of indulgence should not be sold in exchange for money and should not be said for any person who might receive alms.Footnote 33 During her canonization proceedings, one of her sisters recalled that Thomasso, a canon of Gubbio, came to give alms on behalf of Giacomo Colonna, and Clare rejected him at the door.Footnote 34 Clare was happy to accept the protection the powerful Colonna cardinal offered to her, but not when it came to receiving endowments, property, or monetary gifts.Footnote 35 Giacomo's interest in Clare continued after her death. He promoted her canonization case at the Roman curia; with his cousin Cardinal Napoleone Orsini and the radical Franciscan Ubertino da Casale, Giovanni Colonna presented the dissected heart of Clare of Montefalco, displaying to Clement VI the tools of Christ's passion miraculously embedded inside.Footnote 36 Clare was not canonized at that time, but Colonna patronage and advocacy did much to promote radical Franciscan religiosity at the Roman curia.Footnote 37
The strict piety preferred by Clare of Montefalco went against the prevailing almsgiving practices at the time, and could come into conflict with a wealthy benefactor's desire to give copious alms. Refusal of endowments and alms was no longer a new idea within Franciscan thought, but it was still as radical as it had been when Clare of Assisi denied gifts from the wealthy for her own community at San Damiano. Her rejection of large offerings continued to go against normative patronage practices of the time, wherein powerful and rich men and women tried to improve their pious reputations by endowing religious houses. By doing so, they might also be aiding female family members at the house, especially if they saw the convent as an extension of their own kin network. In this way, Clare of Montefalco embraced a stricter form of Franciscan piety, one more in line with Clare of Assisi's rule, which rejected the worldly temptations brought on by endowed property. Her refusal to receive endowments also made it clear that she was not interested in praying for Giacomo's deceased relatives in purgatory, thereby rejecting his family-based, Colonna-style piety.
Clare was not the only Franciscan woman of her time to reject the piety practiced by Roman barons. Angela of Foligno similarly dismissed her natural family, recalling in her Memoriale how she rejoiced at the deaths of her son and husband, because their earthly demise freed her to adopt strict voluntary poverty and a life of communing with the divine.Footnote 38 She celebrated by selling her best property, an inherited country villa, and giving the proceeds to the poor.Footnote 39 Margherita of Cortona also disdained her blood kin, demonstrated by her minimal reaction to the news of her son's possible suicide.Footnote 40 While these women preferred lives of relative solitude and tended not to reside collectively with other women in traditional convents, in their actions one sees the rejection of patrimony so clearly demonstrated by Clare of Assisi, suggesting a spiritual resemblance between Clare and the radical Franciscan women living at the end of the thirteenth century.
Angela of Foligno also rejected conventional attitudes toward alms, but she placed heavy emphasis on the receipt of pious gifts from the poor. In fact, supporting herself through paltry alms made her perfectly liberated from all temporal cares. Her attitude toward alms indicates that when provided by a poor benefactor, the offerings took on supernatural qualities. One night while praying, Angela asked Christ to bless some alms that she had just received from an impoverished beggar. The voice of Christ filled the room, saying,
All the alms which we receive do contain this blessing so that whomever we share them with—such is the power already contained in this blessing—will benefit from them according to the measure of their disposition. And if anyone received them in a state of mortal sin they would still benefit from them for they would have the effect of making them desire sooner to convert themselves to do penance.Footnote 41
Angela's alms could now wash away sins, even mortal ones, and in this way they represented Christ's resurrection as a gift to all humanity. Finally, in order to break from her sinful past Margherita of Cortona also begged for alms incessantly. She gave everything she had to the poor, including offerings that she had just received. Her hagiographer affirmed the extent of her poverty: “she had given in charity all the utensils and conveniences of her humble home, and from love of poverty she reduced herself to nothing but a broken jar, covered with a stone, in which she kept the bread she used for her supper.”Footnote 42 These examples from Angela and Margherita's vitae demonstrate that rather than just having a practical use, alms could take on a mystical character. To the radicals, alms were not simply gifts given in exchange for penitential prayers or indulgences, nor were they only a means by which Franciscan women supported themselves, but to the contrary represented divine love freely given to humanity.
However much a holy woman protested against receiving alms, her religious house could still receive gifts after her death. The Colonna men considered these religious houses to be powerful resources for improving the state of their own souls, and large gifts were given out of an expectation that Angela, Clare, and Margherita's followers would pray for the Colonna and Orsini. In this way, powerful baronial men went to great lengths to support and patronize the cults of radical Franciscan women, whose actions the men supported as long as their own relatives did not participate in such rigorous asceticism. Indeed, Colonna and Orsini religious women did not reject alms, and continued to give away large parts of their inheritance to create endowed religious houses. They did not contest remaining within the cloister or behaving like traditional nuns. Margherita's second vita reflects this other form of Colonna piety, one that did not reject the natural family, but was still deeply rooted in the experience of the cloister.
III. Stefania's Internal Portrayal: Margherita Colonna and her Cloister
The author of Margherita's second vita was another outsider to hagiographical writing. Margherita's successor in her religious community, the abbess Stefania was most likely a Colonna relative, if not a Colonna herself, and joined Margherita's spiritual circle at Castel San Pietro. She compiled anecdotes about Margherita's life between the years 1288 and 1294 as a response to an inquiry made by Margherita's brother, Cardinal Giacomo Colonna, who had taken up the task of presenting a canonization case for his sister after Giovanni Colonna's death in 1292. Like Giovanni Colonna, Stefania represented her own familiarity with the saintly Margherita, but emphasized her contemplative spirituality, her keen awareness of cloistered life, and her capacities as a spiritual leader.
Stefania's vita provides an internal view of aristocratic Roman convent life. Stefania emphasized Margherita's spiritual teachings and preaching, as well as miracles Margherita performed within their household. Stefania also represented Margherita as a noblewoman and a Colonna saint who did not leave behind her natural family. However, in stark contrast to the first vita by Giovanni Colonna, the second depicts Margherita's piety as fundamentally shaped by the social experience of living in a cloister. Margherita's reported exchanges with Stefania and the theological instruction she provided for her sisters reinforces this insider perspective.
The exchanges and teachings described by Stefania privilege a different set of values than those emphasized in Giovanni's vita. In one such exchange, Stefania described a conversation she had with Margherita concerning the holy virtues. While Margherita did not recommend against giving alms, she presented caritas as something distinct from almsgiving, and that the former took precedence over the latter. To Stefania, Margherita explained to Stefania the hierarchy of saintly virtues:
I know dearest Sister, [that] you advise the best and truest things, but because among the holy virtues only caritas obtains primacy, without its perfection neither martyrdom, nor contempt for the world, nor mortification of the flesh, nor the generous giving of alms can please God.Footnote 43
As Stefania tells it, Margherita's understanding of caritas echoes Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, wherein out of the three virtues of faith, hope, and charity [caritas], the third is the most preferred by God.Footnote 44 In both passages, caritas appears not as an act of almsgiving, but as a way to relate to God, while contempt for the world, voluntary martyrdom, and self-mortification—all prominent features in the vitae of other thirteenth-century Franciscan penitents—are downplayed. For instance, Umiliana de' Cerchi enclosed herself in the family tower to avoid temporal cares, Rose of Viterbo (c.1233–1252) desired martyrdom at the hands of heretics, and Margherita of Cortona almost cut off her nose before she was stopped by her confessor.Footnote 45 These may all have been heroic expressions of faith, but Margherita Colonna, as understood by Stefania, might well have found them lacking in charity and tainted by solitary spiritual pride that sought personal perfection at any cost.
In her vita, Stefania depicted Margherita's biography in a way that contrasts with Giovanni's portrayal. She does not refer to Margherita's life in the world, but only to their shared experience in the cloister. Rather than depicting Castel San Pietro as an extension of courtly life at Palestrina, Stefania refers to it as an anchorhold, a place where holy women lived in complete isolation from the world. She stated that Margherita's kinsmen condoned the women's form of life; Giacomo Colonna acted as the community's benefactor, guardian, and custodian, possibly even granting them an anchoritic rule by which to live.Footnote 46
Along with portraying convent life instead of the Colonna court, Stefania also characterized Margherita's spirituality differently than in the first vita. Like Giovanni, Stefania also referred to the moderate's path. However, here moderate piety did not mean granting alms and endowing churches, but rejecting the world for life in a cloistered community. Margherita exemplified this spirituality through renouncing secular life and all its cares, and removing herself from court as much as possible.Footnote 47 This depiction directly contradicts Giovanni's description of moderate Franciscan spirituality, indicating that although united by family ties, the communities of Palestrina and Castel San Pietro were worlds apart in terms of piety. In Stefania's depiction, fleeing the world, rather than commanding it through pious patronage, counted as the most important saintly virtue.
Instead of publicly aiding the poor and visiting churches, Stefania's Margherita committed herself to a cloistered life. Similarly, her miraculous acts involved the women of her immediate community and concerned everyday household matters. Stefania's vita indicates that one Christmas Eve the convent maid Penestrina quickly tried to prepare liscivium, a hot mixture of lye, ash, and hot water used for washing clothes. Although the maid was unaware that the water was too cold for laundering, Margherita called out to her, “I know, sister, I know that the water is not yet hot enough to make liscivium.”Footnote 48 She caught Penestrina before she ruined the nuns' habits with lukewarm soapy ash. Margherita's knowledge of convent life was so startlingly accurate that Stefania included it in her vita.
Along with placing Margherita's saintliness squarely within the cloister, Stefania actively defended the public reputation her beata garnered outside the convent's walls. Stefania's inclusion of a miracle expressing doubt shows her awareness of criticism directed toward Margherita, and that she found this attitude blasphemous to God and offensive to her family's honor. In one post-mortem miracle Stefania chastised a sick man who dared to disparage Margherita's sanctity to his wife. He complained, “look here, it's embarrassing and degrading the way the lords of Colonna overdo it—absurd, disgraceful—trying to violently shoot their sister into the choir of saints.”Footnote 49 His wife, shocked at his blasphemy, urged him to repent. He did so and was cured through Margherita's grace. Clearly, Stefania was sensitive to Colonna concerns, aware of the criticism directed at Margherita outside the cloister, and ready to defend Colonna legitimacy in her vita. This doubt miracle indicated that some local residents held negative opinions about the Colonna, who they believed tried to “create” a saint out of force and coercion. In describing Margherita's post-mortem powers, Stefania provided a rebuttal to masculine criticism of Margherita's sanctity, even if she disagreed with the Colonna men over the exact nature of that sanctity.
The piety expressed by Stefania represented a thriving, but less understood, form of Franciscan feminine spirituality, at once monastic and mendicant. Although it differed from the worldly piety of Colonna men, it also sharply contrasted with the voluntary poverty adopted by Clare of Assisi. Clare's community, the Poor Ladies of San Damiano, supported themselves solely through the alms collected by wandering Franciscan friars and poor laypeople.Footnote 50 These women opted for communal religiosity, one that rejected gifts of rich landed estates or endowments, as the receipt of such alms distracted from a simple spiritual life. They believed that in order to concentrate on pious works, one could not oversee a landed estate, even though it might provide food and financial support when the laity could not procure alms. In rejecting endowments, Clare's followers also gave precedence to the spiritual family over the natural family. In not adopting rigorous poverty, Stefania's community followed a more moderate type of piety that allowed for continued financial support from natural kin.
Although Stefania's version of Margherita differs greatly from Giovanni's in terms of practiced saintly virtues, taken together they reveal a holy woman who resembled other saintly aristocrats, those who came from more distant locales and those born near her rural fortress at Palestrina. The most famous of these women was Elizabeth of Thuringia (1207–1231), daughter of Andrew II of Hungary and wife of Ludwig IV of Thuringia. Widowed at an early age, Elizabeth used her dowry to found a hospital for poor pilgrims. At the end of her life she stopped giving alms, spending her remaining years cloistered and enrapt in visions. She is credited with bringing the Franciscan Order to central Europe and financially supporting their institutions. Her devotional model spread widely by the end of the thirteenth century and inspired many of her kinswomen to enter religious life.Footnote 51 Elizabeth's form of sanctity was innovative because it was based on an older medieval model of saintly royalty recast in a Franciscan context. Performing humility as a nobleperson meant dressing plainly, directly caring for the poor and infirm, and founding pious institutions with patrimonial inheritance or dowries. Isabelle Capet, whose version of a female Franciscan rule was adopted by Margherita's religious community, dressed in simple linens from a young age, studied scripture in solitude instead of appearing at court, and rejected marriage. However, as a celibate woman in charge of her own inheritance, she was able to found family churches and convents and promote pilgrimage to sites associated with the Capet family. She did not adopt radical Franciscan practices, and when she founded her own convent in 1259, she did not adopt Clare's original rule. Furthermore, she omitted the privilege of poverty, which stipulated that female followers of Francis should not own property and only collect alms from the poor.Footnote 52 In keeping with monastic tradition, Isabelle's rule allowed for goods held in common, permitted wealthy family members to give alms to their convents for basic institutional maintenance and upkeep, and let novices enter with their dowries.
Although Elizabeth ignited a literary tradition and Isabelle devised the rule Margherita's religious group later adopted, saintly women closer to Rome provided a local social precedent for Margherita's form of Franciscan spirituality. Thirteenth-century aristocratic women founded new female Franciscan communities in Italy, in a tradition dating back to Francis's lifetime. For instance, Filippa Mareri (c. 1190–1236), an aristocratic Franciscan woman from Lazio, shared notable societal and spiritual ties with Margherita Colonna. Like Margherita, Filippa fled to a hermitage above her family's fortress and allowed her Mareri kin to furnish and decorate her favorite local church. Although she dedicated herself to cloistered contemplation, she continued to receive her relatives into her religious circle.Footnote 53 As seen in Margherita's first vita, Filippa gave large amounts of offerings to family ecclesiastical institutions in the name of humility, but as in Margherita's second vita, she related to God through her caritas within the cloister.Footnote 54 Along with social similarities between the two women, there may have been a direct spiritual connection as well. Soon after her death, Margherita appeared to Fra Bartholomeo, a Colonna ally and Franciscan friar, accompanied by Filippa Mareri and Clare of Assisi in a vision that solidified the spiritual friendship enjoyed by all three women in heaven, if not in life.Footnote 55
Another wealthy founder of a Clarissan convent, Floresenda de Palena (1240–c. 1306) lived in Sulmona, across the Apennine mountains from Palestrina, and was the daughter of a count. She used her dowry to establish a convent, and as abbess she accepted endowments and allowed novices to enter with their inheritance. She continued to accumulate land and wealth for her convent even as she garnered a reputation for sanctity.Footnote 56 Not only did Filippa and Floresenda live in the same central Italian region as Margherita Colonna, both were aristocratic nuns who practiced a form of piety based on worldly endowments and familial territorial interests. Their actions indicate that a local model of female aristocratic Franciscan sanctity existed before the compilation of Margherita's first vita. Furthermore, these baronesses were successful founders of convents and granters of large amounts of alms, and provided saintly precedent for Margherita's aristocratic Franciscan piety. This central Italian model of dignified almsgiving and convent founding contrasts with Franciscan women who were no less aristocratic but far more closely associated with voluntary poverty, such as Clare of Assisi and Umiliana de' Cerchi.
In Stefania's vita, Margherita rejected the world and its cares, preferring a cloistered form of religious life based on contemplation, prayer, and solitude. She did not give copious alms and did not perform grand pilgrimages, but remained in her convent like a good nun. And yet, although Stefania's spirituality contrasted with Giovanni's, it also differed from prevailing forms of Italian Franciscan life. Stefania's Margherita did not embrace the absolute poverty beloved by Clare of Assisi. Clare rejected endowments for her convent and lived on alms collected on her behalf by Franciscan friars, nor did she allow her sisters to endow their convent with dowries, insisting that they live only on the most modest of church properties. Clare resisted—fiercely and, in the end, successfully—even the most well-intentioned efforts to provide her convent of San Damiano with the sort of endowment that would guarantee her community decent support. But her radical refusal of all property under any form was exceptional. Most Franciscan convents, including Margherita Colonna's, made socially appropriate accommodations and accepted property in line with traditional forms of female monasticism.
IV. Conclusion
In May of 1297, Pope Boniface VIII Caetani accused the Colonna of hijacking a convoy loaded with holy relics and gold. He quickly began an inquest against the family, excommunicating Cardinal Giacomo Colonna and his nephew Pietro (also a cardinal), accusing them of heresy, and razing the family compound at Palestrina to the ground after the cardinals' escape. As an act of final humiliation for the family that he wished to see put in its place, Boniface destroyed the shrine of Margherita Colonna in Rome. The family narrowly escaped with Margherita's uncorrupted body, which they deposited with her surviving community at San Silvestro in Capite. It remained safe there, performing miracles from the convent chapel, until Boniface's disfavor reached the doorsteps of the Clarissans. He deposed the abbess, Giovanni Colonna's daughter Giovanna, and excommunicated many of the nuns. This incident immediately predates Boniface's other attempt to legally control female religious life; his Periculoso of 1298 attempted to force uncloistered women into accepting a rule previously approved by the papacy, but took centuries to come to pass.Footnote 57
The papal attack on the Colonna convent was motivated by a personal enmity entirely independent of the problems raised in Periculoso. Proper observance of enclosure by the Colonna nuns at San Silvestro was not a key issue for Boniface. What mattered was that the women inhabiting that particular convent were affiliated with the Colonna. For this reason, the incident at San Silvestro confirms that the Caetani pope recognized the significance of Colonna churches and convents in establishing patrimonial interests. In his assault on the Colonna, Boniface VIII went beyond deposing Colonna cardinals; he desecrated the ecclesiastical institutions associated with the family precisely because they were an important patrimonial focus. He confiscated ancestral Colonna properties, forcing the family to stay in unfamiliar houses.Footnote 58 His assault on Colonna interests and on their promotion of a Colonna saint was far fiercer than any disparaging remark reported by Stefania, and no miracle deflected it. Force eventually answered force, though it took six years, and it was the hand of Sciarra Colonna, not God's, that struck Boniface down at Anagni. In his fury at this outrage, it is unlikely that Boniface spared a thought for one small satisfaction: his obliteration of Margherita Colonna proved an enduring success. She was never canonized, despite the existence of two hagiographical vitae that attempted to establish her cult, and the fame of this noble nun today pales beside that of the penitents Angela of Foligno and Margherita of Cortona, who came from humble backgrounds.
And yet these two works give us a rare glimpse into a particular sort of sanctity not shared by the more frequently studied penitents. Considered separately, they show us two sides of familial expectations of Roman baronial sanctity, one feminine, the other masculine. Together, they reveal an aristocratic feminine sanctity that shows the various ways medieval Italians understood Franciscan poverty. Comparing the two vitae shows that her family held different attitudes toward wealth, patrimony, and saintly virtues. In writing hagiography, men depicted their female saintly subjects as fostering familial interests and endowing familial institutions. Moderate Franciscan women, like Stefania, were more ambivalent toward almsgiving than their male relatives. While the cloistered piety of Stefania and her kinswomen differed from Clare's radical poverty, it resembles the decorous devotion practiced by holy noblewomen from other parts of Europe. Radical Franciscan women completely rejected the receipt of alms unless they came from humble sources, and giving most of their possessions away as alms to poor strangers.
The diversity of Franciscan Italian sanctity had as much to do with familial ties as with pious affiliations. Social class informed the devotion expressed by Margherita's family; both worldly men and cloistered women emphasized the consolidation of wealth and prestige outside the convent. Putting Margherita's two hagiographic texts into a social context helps to differentiate her saintly attributes from other prominent Franciscan women of her time. These vitae also indicate that aristocrats continued to practice traditional forms of monastic religiosity that predated the arrival of Francis. And yet Roman baronial men supported radical women, attempting to bridge the gap between radical and moderate Franciscan piety through bestowing alms on the women's religious houses.
Furthermore, the difference between Margherita Colonna and her radical Franciscan counterparts lies in the conflict between poverty and patrimony at the time. To some, receiving alms smacked of worldliness and clashed with Francis's radical voluntary poverty; in addition, noble lineage stood as an obstacle to a pure religious life. To others, accepting alms meant that one's convent would be supported during lean times, and that souls in purgatory would receive prayers. Unlike receiving alms, giving alms was universally considered to be a pious practice, and ensured the maintenance of patrimony, prayers for one's kin, and the support of poor individuals. Margherita Colonna's two vitae arose from a particularly local socio-religious framework characterized by her family's simultaneous support for Franciscan piety and endowment of ecclesiastical properties. Finally, her lives show that saintly virtues associated with Franciscan piety were not universally praised, but were instead informed by the relationships men and women had with poverty, wealth, family ties, and the afterlife.
