Focusing on the critical case of Catherine of Siena (d. 1380), the essays in this volume consider the role of texts, translations and images in various media in constructing and disseminating the cult of a saint in the late Middle Ages.
How does one construct a saint and promote a cult beyond the immediate community in which he or she lived? Italian mendicants had accumulated a good deal of experience in dealing with this politically explosive question. The posthumous description of the life of Francis of Assisi (d. 1226) written by the Master General of the order, Bonaventure (d. 1274), could be regarded as paradigmatic in this regard. A similarly massive intervention in the production and diffusion of a cult can be observed in the case of the Dominican tertiary, Catherine of Siena (d. 1380), who in many respects (e.g. the imitation of Christ and her stigmatization) ‘competed’ with Francis of Assisi. Raymund of Capua (d. 1399), the Master General of the order, established the foundation for the dissemination of the cult by writing the authoritative life, but it was only the following generation that succeeded in establishing and disseminating the cult on a broad basis by means of copies, adaptations, and translations. The question of how to make a cult, which stands at the center of this volume, thus presents itself in terms of the challenge of rewriting a legend for different audiences. The various contributions consider the role, not only of texts in many different vernaculars (Czech, English, French, German, and Italian), but also of images, whether separately or in connection with one another.
Table of Contents
Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Gabriela Signori – The Making of a Saint: Catherine of Siena, Tommaso Caffarini, and the Others — Introduction
Canonization, Cult, and Relics
Otfried Krafft – Many Strategies and One Goal: The Difficult Road to the Canonization of Catherine of Siena
Michael Hohlstein – ‘Sacra lipsana’: The Relics of Catherine of Siena in the Context of Propagation, Piety, and Community
Gabriella Zarri – Catherine of Siena and the Italian Public
Manuscripts and Prints
Thomas Brakmann – The Transmission of the Upper German Life of Catherine of Siena
Alison Frazier – Humanist Lives of Catherine of Siena: Latin Prose Narratives on the Italian Peninsula (1461–1505)
F. Thomas Luongo – Saintly Authorship in the Italian Renaissance: The Quattrocento Reception of Catherine of Siena’s Letters
Silvia Nocentini – ‘Pro solatio illicteratorum’: The Earliest Italian Translations of the Legenda maior
Dirk Schultze – Translating St Catherine of Siena in Fifteenth-Century England
Catherine in Words and Pictures
Kristin Böse – ‘Uff daz man daz unsicher von dem sichren bekenen mug’: The Evidence of Visions in the Illustrated Vitae of Catherine of Siena
David Ganz – The Dilemma of a Saint’s Portrait: Catherine’s Stigmata between Invisible Body Trace and Visible Pictorial Sign
Catherine M. Mooney – Wondrous Words: Catherine of Siena’s Miraculous Reading and Writing According to the Early Sources
Jane Tylus – Writing versus Voice: Tommaso Caffarini and the Production of a Literate Catherine
Perspectives
Tamar Herzig – Italian Holy Women against Bohemian Heretics: Catherine of Siena and the ‘Second Catherines’ in the Kingdom of Bohemia
Practical information:
J. Hamburger, G. Signori (eds.), Catherine of Siena. The Creation of a Cult, Turnhout, Brepols, 2013. X+342 p., 31 b/w ill., 2 b/w line art. 156 x 234 mm. ISBN: 978-2-503-54415-1. Price: EUR 90,00 excl. tax.
Source:Brepols
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