Margherita Colonna (1255–1280) was born into one of the great baronial families that dominated Rome politically and culturally in the thirteenth century. After the death of her father and mother, Margherita was raised by her brothers, including Cardinal Giacomo Colonna. The two extant contemporary accounts of her short life offer a daring model of mystical lay piety forged in imitation of St. Francis but worked out in the vibrant world of medieval Rome. In Visions of Sainthood in Medieval Rome, Larry F. Field, Lezlie S. Knox, and Sean L. Field present the first English translations of Margherita Colonna’s two “lives” and a dossier of associated texts, along with thoroughly researched contextualization and scholarly examination. The first of the two lives was written by a layman, the Roman Senator Giovanni Colonna, one of Margherita Colonna's brothers. The second was written by a woman named Stefania, who had been a close follower of Margherita Colonna and assumed leadership of her Franciscan community after Margherita's death. These intriguing texts open up new perspectives on numerous historical questions. How did authorial gender and status influence hagiographic perspective? How fluid was the nature of female Franciscan identity during the era in which the papacy was creating the Order of St. Clare? What were the experiences and influences of female visionaries? And what was the process of saint-making at the heart of an aristocratic Roman family? These texts add rich new texture to our overall picture of medieval visionary culture and will interest students and scholars of medieval and renaissance history, literature, religion, and women's studies.

Margherita Colonna (1255-1280) was born into one of the great baronial families that dominated Rome politically and culturally in the thirteenth century. After the death of her father and mother, Margherita was raised by her brothers, including Cardinal Giacomo Colonna. The two extant contemporary accounts of her short life offer a daring model of mystical lay piety forged in imitation of St. Francis but worked out in the vibrant world of medieval Rome. In 'Visions of sainthood in medieval Rome', the authors present the first English translations of Margherita Colonna's two "lives" and a dossier of associated texts, along with thoroughly researched contextualization and scholarly examination. The first of the two lives was written by a layman, the Roman Senator Giovanni Colonna, one of Margherita Colonna's brothers. The second was written by a woman named Stefania, who had been a close follower of Margherita Colonna and assumed leadership of her Franciscan community after Margherita's death. These intriguing texts open up new perspectives on numerous historical questions. How did authorial gender and status influence hagiographic perspective? How fluid was the nature of female Franciscan identity during the era in which the papacy was creating the Order of St. Clare? What were the experiences and influences of female visionaries? And what was the process of saint-making at the heart of an aristocratic Roman family?

How elite Roman families used genealogy, architecture, and the urban fabric to appropriate the city’s saints for their own Domesticating Saints in Medieval and Early Modern Rome explores the creative efforts of some of Rome’s most prominent noble families to weave themselves into Rome’s Christian past. Maya Maskarinec shows how, from late antiquity to early modernity, elite Roman families used genealogy, architecture, and the urban fabric to appropriate the city’s saints for their own, eventually claiming them as ancestors. Over the course of the Middle Ages, there developed a pronounced sense that churches and their saints belonged to specific regions, neighborhoods, and even families. These associations, coupled with a resurgent interest in Rome’s Christian antiquity as well as in noble lineages, enabled Roman families to “domesticate” the city’s saints and dominate the urban landscape and its politics into the early modern era. These families cultivated saintly genealogies and saintly topologies (exploiting, for example, the increasingly prolific identification of churches as the former residences of early Christian and late antique saints), cementing presumed connections between place, descent, and moral worth. Drawing from sources spanning the fourth to the late sixteenth century, Maskarinec brings into conversation saints’ lives, documentary evidence, family genealogies, monumental and domestic architecture, and medieval and early modern guidebooks, sources not often studied together. Bridging the divide between secular and sacred histories of Rome, Domesticating Saints in Medieval and Early Modern Rome repositions these materials within a new story, of how Romans made the city’s classical and Christian past their own and thereby empowered and immortalized their families.

The thirteenth-century Latin hagiographic works known as the "Holy Women of Liège" corpus presents biographies filled with dramatic visions of God and intense physical unions with Christ. The texts that make up the collection demonstrate the problematic division of body and soul in the period and also reveal the potential of text to transmit visual experiences. This book explores those qualities of the texts using the latest developments in film theory, taking up such topics as the relationship of film to mortality, embodied spectatorship, celebrity studies, and digital environments.

This dissertation situates the development of early medieval Rome as a sacred city in its 6th- to 9th-century Mediterranean and Carolingian contexts. It demonstrates how the circulation of saints' cults through Rome contributed to fashioning Rome into a cosmopolitan cultural center that could radiate abroad its practices of commemoration to the Carolingian world north of the Alps. I challenge traditional teleological narratives that portray the early Middle Ages as a `dark' age in which Rome's sacred topography was orchestrated single-handedly by the papacy. Instead, I use understudied evidence (in particular saints' legends and recent archeological work), to retrieve a vibrant plurality of voices--of Byzantine administrators, refugees, aristocrats, monks, pilgrims, and others--who, together with ecclesiastics, participated in a shared eastern Mediterranean/Byzantine Christian culture and shaped a distinctly Roman version of Christian sanctity. This new Rome was appreciated and emulated by Carolingian audiences north of the Alps: a circulation of sanctity that reified and expanded Rome's `universalizing' pretensions. An introduction explains the topic and presents an overview of Christian dedications in early medieval Rome. Six chapters consider saints or groups of saints in different neighborhoods, illustrating how diverse communities integrated these saints into Rome's sacred topography and how, in turn, these cults were exported to Carolingian audiences north of the Alps. Two chapters then investigate the means by which Rome's diverse sanctity was gradually incorporated into a more unified physical and mental landscape: Ch. 7, on the evolving papal interest in groupings of saints who offered bulwarks of sanctity for Rome and the papacy, and Ch. 8, on the Carolingian reception and appropriation of Roman sanctity, as seen through the lens of Ado's highly successful late-9th-century martyrology (calendar of saints), which presents a comprehensive vision of a Christian Rome. Altogether, this reveals a city enmeshed in a wider world, whose distinctive profile of sanctity was not autochthonous or predestined, but which developed gradually, drawing on the far-flung resources of the medieval world.

Visions were highly popular in the late Middle Ages, whether preached as vivid stories from the pulpit, illuminated in saint-filled manuscripts, or experienced during the breathless anticipation of a Mass or eerie darkness of a Yorkshire graveyard. This volume is the first to map out the wide range of vision types in late medieval English lay piety. Analyzing 1000 visionary accounts gathered from sermon and exempla collections, religious devotional works, saints’ legends, and lay stories, it explores five central dynamics of spirituality that visions shaped and sustained: Transactions of Satisfaction (visits to and from purgatory and hell), Reciprocated Devotion (visitations of the saints), Spiritual Warfare (attacks by demons), Supra-Sacramental Sight (Mass and Passion sightings), and Mediated Revelation (prophetic visions).

Hagiography is a rich source for our knowledge of many aspects of medieval culture and tradition. The lives and miracles of the saints may be read on several levels, both as an expression of the dominant ideology and as a reflection of long-term themes in medieval society. The essays in this volume attempt to exploit the Latin hagiographical sources of the medieval West as means of illuminating our understanding of a variety of such themes: childhood and adolescence, elite and popular religion, sainthood and politics, the mechanism of canonisation, women in the church, dreams, visions and the concept of the miraculous, and the convergence of heresy, disbelief and piety.

Inspired by the work of eminent scholar Richard Kieckhefer, The Sacred and the Sinister explores the ambiguities that made (and make) medieval religion and magic so difficult to differentiate. The essays in this collection investigate how the holy and unholy were distinguished in medieval Europe, where their characteristics diverged, and the implications of that deviation. In the Middle Ages, the natural world was understood as divinely created and infused with mysterious power. This world was accessible to human knowledge and susceptible to human manipulation through three modes of engagement: religion, magic, and science. How these ways of understanding developed in light of modern notions of rationality is an important element of ongoing scholarly conversation. As Kieckhefer has emphasized, ambiguity and ambivalence characterize medieval understandings of the divine and demonic powers at work in the world. The ten chapters in this volume focus on four main aspects of this assertion: the cult of the saints, contested devotional relationships and practices, unsettled judgments between magic and religion, and inconclusive distinctions between magic and science. Freshly insightful, this study of ambiguity between magic and religion will be of special interest to scholars in the fields of medieval studies, religious studies, European history, and the history of science. In addition to the editor, the contributors to this volume are Michael D. Bailey, Kristi Woodward Bain, Maeve B. Callan, Elizabeth Casteen, Claire Fanger, Sean L. Field, Anne M. Koenig, Katelyn Mesler, and Sophie Page.

This handsomely illustrated book suggests new ways of understanding a cultural institution central to the spiritual and artistic imagination of the Middle Ages. Bringing together fourteen essays by contributors representing a number of disciplines, it illuminates issues including the place of sanctity in society, the role of gender in the representation of sainthood, and the use of hagiographic conventions in other genres.

This is a standard work of reference for the study of the religious history of western Christianity in the later middle ages which, since its original publication in French in 1981, has come to be regarded as one of the great contributions to medieval studies of recent times. Hagiographical texts and reports of the processes of canonisation - a mode of investigation into saints' lives and their miracles implemented by the popes from the end of the twelfth century - are here used for the first time as major source materials. The book illuminates the main features of the medieval religious mind, and highlights the popes' attempts to gain firmer control over the wide variety of expressions of faith towards the saints in order to promote a higher pattern of devotion and moral behaviour among Christians.