I, Catherine

 

In the name of Jesus Christ crucified and sweet Mary.

 

Dearest beloved Father in Christ sweet Jesus, I Catherine, use­less servant of Jesus Christ, entrust myself to you; with a desire to see us united and transformed in that sweet, eternal and pure Truth, Truth that cleanses us of every falsehood and lie. I dearest Father, cordially thank you for the saintly zeal and jealous care that you have for my soul; because it seems to me that you are very worried, hearing about my life. I am sure you have no other motive than the desire to honor God and care for my health, fear­ing a demonic siege and self‑deception. About this fear, Father, particularly about the matter of eating, I am not surprised; I as­sure you not only you are fearful, I myself also tremble with fear of a demonic trick. But I place myself in the goodness of God; and do not trust myself, knowing that in myself I cannot trust. In re­sponse to your question whether I believed it possible to be de­ceived, saying that if I did not so believe this [in itself] would be a demonic deception, I answer you that not only in this, which is merely a bodily function, but in this and in all my other actions, because of my frailness and the devil's cunning I am always afraid, thinking that I may be deceived; because I know and see that the devil lost beatitude but not knowledge with which knowledge, as I said, I know he could deceive me. But I turn to and lean upon the tree of the most holy cross of Christ crucified and there I wish to be nailed; and do not doubt that I will be pierced through and nailed with him for love and with deep humility, that devils will not harm me, not for my virtue but for the virtue of Christ crucified.

You wrote to me saying in particular that I should pray God that I might eat. And I say to you, my Father, and I say it to you in the sight of God, that in every possible way I could I always forced myself once or twice a day to take food; and I prayed continually and I pray to God and will pray, that he will grace me in this matter of eating so that I may live like other creatures, if this is his will, because mine is there. I say to you that many times, when I did what I could, then I looked into myself to understand my infirmity, and [the goodness of] God who by a most singular mercy allowed me to correct the vice of gluttony. It saddens me greatly that I did not correct this weakness [myself] for love. As to myself I do not know what other remedy to try, other than that I beg you that you beseech that highest eternal Truth to grant me the grace of allowing me to take food, if this be more for his honor and for the health of my soul, and if it pleases him. And I am certain that God's goodness will not disdain your prayers. I beg you that whatever remedy you see in this, you write to me, and as long as it is the will of God I shall take it gladly. And further I beg you that you not be too quick to judge, unless you have cleared yourself in the presence of God. I say nothing further. Remain in the holy and sweet love of God. Sweet Jesus, loving Jesus.

[CATHERINE BENINCASA, to a Religious in Florence].1

 

 

Catherine Benincasa was a woman of about twenty-six when she dictated these words, sometime in 1373 or 1374. Already a person of considerable reputation for outstanding holiness, she was also a center of controversy. Typically she confronted her enemies and detractors with the subtle mixtures of defiance, irony, sarcasm, and exasperating claims of total humility that mark this letter. Always she acted in every matter as she said her spiritual bridegroom Jesus Christ told her she should, and not as earthly men might order or advise. That she ate almost nothing was widely known; such behavior not only was scandalous in itself but led some of her contemporaries to believe she was possessed  by the devil. Her abstemiousness went far beyond the austere or ritual fasting of even the most holy men and women of her day and often was in direct violation of the explicit directions of her confessors. Various of these men assigned to watch, control, and guide her in the path of holiness (and to protect the Church from a possible heretic in its midst) ordered her to eat. For a time she obeyed, but the presence of even a mouthful of food in her stomach caused her to vomit, and after a while she simply refused. Warned that by such eating habits she was bringing about her own death, Catherine shot back that eating would kill her anyway so she might as well die of starvation, and do as she wished in the meantime.2

 

The most important source of our information about Catherine Benincasa is a biography composed during the decade or so after her death by Raymond of Capua. He became her confessor and spiritual guide in 1374, shortly after Catherine had been summoned from Siena to Florence to appear before a formal Church commission and give an account of her­self. Although she managed to persuade her inquisitors of the cor­rectness of her thought and behavior, nonetheless both the Mas­ter General of the Dominican Order, of which she was a tertiary, and the Pope decided jointly to appoint the somewhat worldly, oc­casionally skeptical, and already powerful Raymond to be her new confessor and to watch closely over her. During the next four years their spiritual and personal relationship was intense. For Catherine confession was no perfunctory accounting of sins followed by ab­solution and penance but a long and detailed theological and psy­chological examination of all the extraordinary experiences of her religious life. Raymond served as Catherine's counselor no less than Freud did for his favored patients centuries later, nor did the Dominican friar fail to record carefully all that he observed or heard from Catherine during their extended sessions. After her death Raymond collected his own notes and those of her earlier confessor, as well as the testimonies of many other people who had known her.

 

From these sources he constructed a legenda. The term to him had its original meaning of a thing to be read rather than the mod­ern connotation of a fable; he meant it to be the fundamental, documented account of her life, for the edification of the faithful and with an eye to Catherine's possible canonization. He left out stories he could not verify from multiple firsthand witnesses (whose names he listed in his text) or that to him seemed exagger­ated or fanciful. Still, like nearly everyone in his day, his belief in the supernatural was unquestioned and he certainly never in­tended to be a rational, scientific historian. As he must have an­ticipated in taking time out from his many duties to write the vita, for by this time he himself had become Master General of the Dominican Order in Italy, it was the basis not only for Catherine's ultimate canonization in 1461 but also was read widely and became a source of inspiration for preachers and artists alike. A vernacular translation by Neri di Landoccio soon followed and appeared in print in 1477, one of the earliest published books; that three other editions rolled off the presses before the end of the century clearly indicates Catherine's popularity among both clergy and laity. Her life became a model consciously imitated by holy anorexics over the next two centuries. Raymond of Capua's Legenda consists of thirty chapters of which the seventeenth, running to fifteen good‑sized printed pages in the modern edition, is devoted to Catherine's eating habits.3

 

As a youth Catherine had fasted rigorously but not to excess by the standards of this age of heroic asceticism. Then at the time of her conversion to radical holiness, beginning when she was not yet sixteen, she restricted her diet to bread, uncooked vegetables, and water. About five years later, following her father's death and visions in which Christ told her to give up her solitary ways and go forth in the company of worldly men and women, she lost her appetite and could not eat bread. By the age of twenty‑five, maybe a bit earlier we are told, she ate "nothing." Elsewhere it becomes clear that Catherine did not in fact eat nothing and that total suppression of hunger did not come to her easily or involuntarily (as her letter quoted earlier ingenuously claims) in the absence of her religious impulses. While dressing the cancerous breast sores of a woman she was tending, Catherine felt repulsed at the horrid odor of the suppuration. Determined to overcome all bodily sensations, she carefully gathered the pus into a ladle and drank it all. That night she envisioned Jesus inviting her to drink the blood flowing from his pierced side, and it was with this consolation that her stomach "no longer had need of food and no longer could digest."4

 

Raymond bases his account of Catherine's anorexia both on her confessions to him and on the writings (subsequently lost, although "Caffarini" may have incorporated them in his work) of her previous confessor, a relative named Tommaso. Divine grace so infused her body and deadened her life fluids that the nature of her stomach was transformed, is how Raymond begins. "Not only did she not need food, but she could not even eat without pain. If she forced herself to eat, her body suffered greatly, she could not digest and she had to vomit." Her family and friends immediately suspected a diabolic trick. Even her earlier confessor, who (Raymond tells us) meant well but was not very discerning, ordered her to ignore what he suspected was a demonically inspired impulse and to eat at least once a day. Catherine obeyed reluctantly, because she felt stronger and healthier when she did not eat; she grew ill and tired but still he commanded her to eat until she was reduced nearly to the point of death. Only then did Tommaso accept her reasoning that it would be better to die from fasting than from eating and tell her to "do as the Holy Spirit suggests to you."5

 

Freed from the command of her early confessor, Catherine had to face the world. Concerning her inability to eat, writes Raymond, "everyone had something to say against this holy virgin." Certainly her habits were difficult to understand. She drank only a little cold water and chewed on bitter herbs while spitting out the substance. To Raymond and others she seemed about to die at any moment, yet, until the very end, at the opportunity to honor God or do an act of charity, and without medicine, she became robust, vigorously outwalked her companions, and never grew tired‑-in short, she became hyperactive. She took nourishment from the host alone, a connection not lost on her ever‑probing confessor and biographer. One day Raymond asked Catherine whether when she did not receive communion her appetite was stimulated. Her answer suggests a concentration on the host that is found among virtually all holy anorexics, one that reveals continued mental effort to suppress bodily urges that in fact are not entirely dormant: "When I cannot receive the Sacrament, it satisfies me to be nearby and to see it; indeed, even to see a priest who has touched the Sacrament consoles me greatly, so that I lose all memory of food."6

 

Detractors stated flatly that the whole self‑starvation routine was a fiction she perpetrated to aggrandize her reputation and that secretly she ate very well indeed. Other skeptical observers recalled the biblical warning against Catherine's behavior, reminding her of Jesus' command to his disciples: eat and drink that which is placed before you (Luke 10:7). Who was she to refuse to do what Christ on earth, his glorious Mother, and the Apostles did? They ate and drank; a truly holy person ought to seek never to be singled out for attention and therefore in all matters follow common customs. Il Bianco da Siena, a follower of the harshly ascetic gesuati, who joined her compatriot Giovanni Colombini, wrote a laude to rebuke Catherine on this very point. Even a brief excerpt conveys the sarcastic and serene disrespect with which many men of religion greeted the Benincasa girl:7

Now watch out, sister of mine                           Or ti guarda, suora mia

That you not fall in great ruin                                         Che no caggi in gran ruina:

If you have grace divine                                                Se tu hai grazia divina,

Make sure that you keep it                                            Fa che l’abbia conservata

 

Sister of mine, with cross ahead                                    Suora mia, con croce in fronte

Beware of the oiled praises                                           Guardati dalle lod' unte:

That already have led many astray                                 Molte n' hanno già disgiunte

From goodness uncreated                                             Dalla bontà  increata

 

If the Spirit guides you                                      Se lo Spirito ti mena

For earthly praise do not look                                       Non cercar loda terrena,

By it the soul gets loose                                     Per la qual l'anima sfrena,

If by her it is desired                                                     Se da lei è disiata

 

He receives a big blow                                      Grande riceve spatassa

Who follows one not keeping himself low                      Chi segue chi non s'abassa

If by praise your mind is fattened                                   Se d'onor tua mente ingrassa

With pain it will be flattened                                          Con dolor fie dimagrata

 

More disconcerting to Catherine, and certainly more dangerous, was the suspicion of demonic possession or witchcraft. According to the beliefs of her day, Catherine's ability to live on without food might well mean that she was being fed by the devil in a symbiotic rapport with a familiar or an incubus. If this were so, again according to a logic that made as good sense to Catherine as to her detractors, she would not accept earthly food. The obvious way to silence her enemies, and all others who in one way or another were scandalized by her fasting, was to prove that at least she would try to eat like anyone else. Thus, to demonstrate that she was not possessed, or possibly the even more serious charge that she might be a witch, Catherine began to eat once daily and in the company of her companions. Raymond of Capua at this time apparently was already her confessor, which indicates that she was at least twenty‑seven years old. He describes her new lifestyle as follows:

As we have said above, her stomach could digest nothing and her body heat consumed no energy; therefore anything she ingested needed to exit by the same way it entered, otherwise it caused her acute pain and swelling of her entire body. The holy virgin swallowed nothing of the herbs and things she chewed; nevertheless, because it was impossible to avoid some crumb of food or juice descending into her stomach and because she willingly drank fresh water to quench her thirst, she was constrained every day to vomit what she had eaten. To do this she regularly and with great pain inserted stalks of fennel and other plants into her stomach, otherwise being unable to vomit. Because of her disparagers and particularly those who were scandalized by her fasting, she maintained this life‑style until her death [about six years later].

 

Raymond, who one suspects may have advised Catherine in the first place to accept this eating/vomiting pattern both because he himself was unsure about her and to quash rumors of diabolic influence that inevitably cast a shadow on him, finally urged Catherine to ignore her detractors and abandon such agonizing ways. She refused, telling her confessor that the painful vomiting was penance for her sins and she much preferred to receive her just punishment in this world than the next. Raymond is left speechless by such inspired wisdom and closes his chapter by urging readers to reflect upon how this strange gift of God -- Catherine's loss of appetite and inability to eat -- became by her will and understanding a response pattern to be imitated.8

 

Catherine recognized fully that penitential routines and self-punishment did not in themselves bring her closer to spiritual perfection. In The Dialogue she urged "holy hatred" of oneself and "love fixed more on virtue than on penance." Penance, she wrote, must be measured according to one's need and capability. The essential effort had to be the destruction of self‑will, not the accumulation of superficially meritorious acts. Further on in The Dialogue God warned her: "Reprove yourself if ever the devil or your own short‑sightedness should do you the disservice of making you want to force all my servants to walk the same path you yourself follow." Notwithstanding the vast differences between Catherine's drive to be united with God and the modern‑day anorexic's quest for a sense of self, the psychological dilemma is similar. The fourteenth‑century saint, like the twentieth‑century patient, says she cannot eat and denies that she is asserting her will or being stubborn. But it is her will that is at stake, and unless something works to deflect the contest, its logical outcome is death.9

 

From all this testimony‑Catherine's own words, the disparaging comments of her detractors, and especially the lengthy, often perplexed, and inadvertently revealing Legenda by Raymond of Capua, not to mention the briefer or less reliable accounts discussed in the endnotes -- a composite summary of Catherine Benincasa's anorexia emerges. What may have begun as religiously inspired fasting at some point escaped Catherine's full conscious control. As with present‑day anorexics, she could be very active physically, slept very little, and claimed that she gladly would eat but had no appetite. When her fame grew, enemies fastened hard on her well‑known refusal or inability to take food and variously charged her with being a liar, an unholy egotist, and a witch. Supporters and confessors urged or ordered her to eat; when she did so it was only to enter into an eating/vomiting cycle such as is common among acute, long‑term anorexics. Whatever the primacy of physical circumstances involved, it was Catherine's will that shaped the course of her infirmity and gave it meaning. Throughout, she consciously countered the urges of appetite by concentrating on the host. No one, including Catherine, saw her diet in itself as something heroically ascetic. On the contrary, by the sheer power of her conviction she convinced people that behavior commonly thought to be insane or demonic was holy. None of the efforts of Catherine's friends, confessors, or enemies succeeded in changing her ways and curing her anorexia, and in the end she starved herself to death.10

 

To understand the personality that exuded such iron will and self‑assurance is yet more difficult and problematic than the effort thus far to establish that Catherine's anorexia was not merely a case of excessive asceticism. At most I hope to offer a way, not necessarily the only way, of explaining why this young woman behaved as she did, how she understood herself, and how people reacted to her. I have no useful quarrel with those who would begin with a supernatural explanation, but mine will be a human analysis and the causes asserted will all be earthly. Therefore let us begin with breastfeeding, a subject as fascinating to hagiographers as to psychoanalysts.

 

Catherine was a twin, and both babies were weak. Her mother, Lapa Piacenti, was in her early forties and previously had borne twenty‑two children, of whom less than half are known to have survived their infancy. Lapa did the right thing and quickly had both girls baptized lest they die without grace. Then she made the difficult choice of sending the sickly Giovanna out to a wet nurse while taking Catherine to her own breast. Giovanna died within a short time, but Catherine gradually gained strength and soon was robust. Lapa recalled that never before had she been able to complete nursing her children because always she had found herself pregnant, but with Catherine this did not happen and she nursed the infant for at least a full year before weaning her. Only then did Lapa become pregnant and give birth once more, probably when Catherine was about two, to a girl she named Giovanna in the memory of Catherine's dead twin. The new baby, affectionately called Nanna, died on April 18, 1363, the very year of Catherine's dramatic conversion to radical holiness. The source of these intimate details is Lapa herself, who lived to the ripe age of eighty-five or so and told them to Raymond of Capua as he was working on his biography of Catherine. His portrait of Lapa is generally unflattering, as are those of all other testimonies, but he does note that he believes her fully because "as everyone who knows her agrees, and notwithstanding her eighty years, she is so unaffected that even if she wanted to tell a lie she would not be able to."12

 

Whatever the accuracy of Lapa's recollections, it is unlikely that Catherine retained into the crucial years of her adolescence any direct memory of how she was nursed. If her presumably favored infancy left a permanent psychological impact on the girl, the surviving records cannot establish this fact beyond doubt. I believe Erik Erikson's theory on oral contentment may be applicable here to explain Catherine's enormous capacity for faith, but I do not know how to prove it from historical documents. Readers willing to consider the matter might begin with the following quotation from one of Catherine's confessions, as she described a vision in which she received Christ's succor: "Do you know, father, what God did for my soul that day? He did as a mother does to the child she loves the most. She shows her breast, but keeps it out of reach until he begins to cry; then she smiles benignly and takes him to her breast and, kissing him, presents the food happily and abundantly. This is what God did to me. That day he showed me from far away his holy side, and I cried with great desire to place my lips on the most sacred wound." It was "in exchange" for this consolation that Catherine believed God made her suffer a sharp and continuous pain in her breast."12

 

Moreover, some evidence we shall look at presently suggests surprisingly hostile feelings on Catherine's part about weaning. What is very likely, however, given all we are told about Lapa's ways, is that when the teenage Catherine began experimenting with radical and highly individualistic religious expressions, her anxious mother quickly and often flung at her daughter the obligation of having been a special infant, a child chosen to survive when her twin did not. Later, in a letter to her brothers in which Catherine reprimanded them for their lack of filial devotion, she explicitly reminded them of the "obligation" they owed to their mother because she had tried to nurse them.13

 

The year in which Catherine's mother weaned her favored girl, 1348,  was a year of death. The plague struck with a virulence that terrorized the entire population, killing its victims within three days and striking one household or another without apparent reason. Murder, sorcery, lawlessness, and prayer all coexisted in a society where the dead seemed to outnumber the living. The general pandemonium of people escaping the city, corpses piling up on the streets, and survivors driven mad with fear that they would be the next to fall surely affected the Benincasa household. We need only to recall the vivid description by Catherine's contemporary, Giovanni Boccaccio, in his introduction to The Decameron. "This disaster had struck such fear into the hearts of men and women that brother abandoned brother, uncle abandoned nephew, sister left brother, and very often wife abandoned husband, and‑even worse, almost unbelievable‑fathers and mothers neglected to tend and care for their children as if they were not their own." Even if little Catherine was not a victim of neglect or abuse, the times were bad."14

 

Whether the family left Siena for their country home a few miles away we do not know, but it is not unlikely that their pressing business concerns led them to decide to stay in their town quarters and hope for God's protection. Giacomo, Catherine's father, was a dyer of some means, known for his patience and good sense. To join the fleeing throng offered no hope if God's will was that they should die, and to attempt escape meant abandoning his business. It was a particularly bad time to do that since only a year and a half earlier his eldest son had entered into a partnership with two other Sienese dyers and they had started their own firm, with Giacomo's help and blessing. The venture must have been going badly; sometime before August 1349 both partners died. Their heirs and Giacomo's eldest son on July 30, 1349, lost a major legal suit brought against them by Tomuccio di Iacobo di Colombino before Siena's Market Council. Exactly how much direct financial loss the infant Catherine's father suffered cannot be determined for sure since the accounts indicate that he established his son in business but do not prove that they were also legal partners; still, Giacomo was not one of the many plague survivors who prospered as massive population decline left a relatively constant amount of wealth to be shared among fewer people. All descrip­tions of Lapa suggest that this worldly woman was very concerned with financial success, and the legal record testifies that her son soon was to become responsible for a debt more than twice as large as his original investment. The evidence of such business misfortune suggests little likelihood that the understandably dis­traught Lapa and Giacomo handled the weaning process in a way that would assist, or at least not profoundly affect, Catherine's emotional development. And then there are Catherine's mother's physiological circumstances to consider."15

 

Lapa was in her forties and yet "never before" had weaned her children, apparently because always she had found herself preg­nant. When this happens a mother's milk becomes watery, losing its rich sweetness, and it is the child who soon rejects the breast in favor of more satisfying nourishment, not the mother who de­nies it. There is no triumph of the mother's will over her child's desire, but a physical change that neither controls nor even under­stands instantly but that both soon must accept. With Catherine it was different -- Lapa first weaned Catherine and only then be­came pregnant. This mother's no‑nonsense ways may have been hardened when she found herself so inexperienced in a matter that most women of her age knew how to handle. In so ordinary and seemingly trivial a contest of wills as weaning, it had to be mother Lapa who triumphed over daughter Catherine, but as an adult this particular child made sure never to lose such battles, often redefining a situation in her mind so that what might appear to others as obedience in this world was to her a triumph in the next for the bridegroom with whom she was united."16

 

Catherine never wrote about her own weaning, nor is there reason to suggest that any person has a direct and conscious re­collection of such early experiences, but her mature understand­ing of the process is plain enough. She was in Avignon, France, in the late summer of 1376 on the most important mission of her public life, both as a special envoy for the warring city of Florence and to persuade Pope Gregory XI to return the Papacy to Rome. After an elaborate face‑to‑face meeting with the Supreme Pontiff, Catherine's most cherished desire was about to be realized, and we may understand that she saw this triumph as the result of her personal efforts rather than as the conjuncture of geopolitical con­siderations that historians know it was. Then at the last moment Gregory wavered, asking Catherine for her opinion about a letter he had received from an unnamed holy man warning him that he would be poisoned if he returned to Rome. Her response is filled with livid anger and rebuke, certainly for the supposed holy man (whom she calls “less than a child,” a “simpleton,” and an “evil devil”) and at least by implication for anyone who would follow such advice. She continues:

I think he wants to do with you as the mother does to her child when she wants to take away the milk from his mouth. She puts something bitter on her breast so that he tastes the bitterness before the milk, so that for fear of the bitter he abandons the sweet; because a child is deceived more by bitterness than by anything else . . . And I pray you on behalf of Christ crucified not to be a timid child but manly. Open your mouth and swallow the bitter for the sweet. It does not become your Holiness to abandon milk because of the bitterness."

In all her writings Catherine uses metaphors with abandon, mixing them freely and spontaneously; yet patterns emerge and it is hardly coincidental that at this crucial moment in her life, when her will that Gregory should return to Rome is being challenged by a powerful enemy, she uses maternal imagery. Nor is the choice of particular words without meaning. The simple word for weaning does not come to her mind, nor the commonly understood phrase for "breaking the habit" that Italians know means weaning; instead, she attempts to describe literally what happens by saying tollere il latte di bocca. Taking away or "removing milk from the mouth" is not precisely what happens, but that is how Catherine understands the matter. Shortly thereafter she uses the word ingannare to explain that a child is most easily "deceived" by bitterness. The word is a powerful one, generally reserved for the work of the devil or for adultery and other such familial deception and treachery. From the context of Catherine's letter to Pope Gregory it is impossible to be certain about how and why she uses this particular word; her letter is filled with references to the devil and also with very personal familial imagery. Maternal weaning and diabolic ruin of the Papacy have become one in Catherine's thought. Then, in a complete reversal of reality, she equates manliness with refusing to give up the breast and timidity with the usual growth process. Finally, the last phrase, in which Catherine uses the words "vostra Sanctita" (your Holiness), might also be read as "your Sanctity." If it were anyone else writing to the Pope this phrase might be passed over as a common form of address, but we know that this young woman regularly called Gregory her "Daddy," even her "sweetest Daddy," and neither knew about nor cared for proper form. Saint that she would be, Catherine had to be too humble to consider herself a saint and not so presumptuous as to grant this designation to Pope Gregory; and yet the words, and the weaning context, refer to both of them."18

 

We are on speculative ground here: a devastating plague, but one during which babies other than Catherine were weaned; business misfortunes not all that uncommon in the fourteenth century; a mother no worse or better than many; and an adult metaphor that may be read in several ways. And yet the combination of circumstances and words does tell something, especially if the question of why Catherine behaved as she did looms large. I suggest that Catherine's adult reference to weaning (one of many) is neither immaterial nor a simple carryover of common wisdom, but rather a possibly subconscious recounting of her own infant experience, and much more probable and significant, a conscious retelling of what her mother has made her feel deeply many times over, especially during their battles over Catherine's self‑destructive asceticism: the comfort of the breast cannot be a safe haven or a place of return, for the exit is too painful. Catherine's self-starvation was not regression to oral delights (as some of the modern theories discussed in the preceding chapter would suggest) because for her the promise of being a special, chosen child always meant the death of another. Survival was a contest requiring manliness and the path of sanctity was bitter. For the young Benincasa girl it came to include sustained anorexia."19

 

Catherine spent her early years in the crowded Sienese district of Fontebranda, where she appears to have grown up much like other girls her age in the 1350s. She was a happy child, out of the house a lot and with a ready smile. The precocious religious expressions told by her biographers all seem quite natural. It is said that at the age of five she was found genuflecting and saying a Hail Mary at each step as she climbed to her bedroom. Such delight in ritual repetitiveness is quite common among children and this particular practice, which originated in Ireland, was widespread among the Sienese. Neighbors and playmates called Catherine "Euphrosyne," perhaps because the child reminded them of this legendary virgin or else because Catherine herself spoke with such incessant eagerness of her heroine. She learned about Euphrosyne from the widely popular Golden Legend of Jacopo da Varazze, which recounts how centuries earlier a beautiful young girl, to escape an unwanted marriage and an angry father, changed into man's attire and retired to a monastery. Only on her deathbed, wasted by severe austerities, did Euphrosyne reveal to her grieving father her true identity, and he afterward spent his remaining ten years in her cell. That Catherine should have been so taken with the tale that she answered to the name Euphrosyne shows only a healthy and childish imagination. As an adolescent she faced the same difficulty as Euphrosyne, yet she forged a very different solu­tion. That often she was seen frequenting local churches, gazing at images of saints, transfixed by candles, and inhaling incense does not surprise us. Her alternative was to sit at home with her busy, scolding mother and the noise and smell of her father's dye­ing works on the floor below.20

 

At the age of six or seven, as she returned with her brother Stefano from an all‑day errand to her married sister that took them beyond the city gates, Catherine experienced her first vi­sion. In the sunset sky ahead of her she saw a loggia full of radiant light; Jesus, robed all in white like a bishop with the pastoral staff, smiled at her. Behind him were several saints, also dressed in white, and a shaft of light, a sunbeam, came from him and fell on her. Catherine stopped in her tracks, only to be rudely shaken by her brother when she did not answer his call. When she looked back up at the sky the vision had disappeared. The sunset, the tir­ing and exciting long day, the white imagery -- it is all very natural and shows none of the extraordinary and embellished qualities so common in accounts of saints' lives. Even more revealing for our purposes is Catherine's reaction afterward. She said nothing to Stefano nor for several years to her parents or anyone else. Instead, she meditated in solitude, tried to understand whether the vision was good or evil, and what to make of it. The expected reaction of a religious seven‑year‑old who experiences a clearly happy and re­inforcing vision would be to run home to tell her parents, perhaps also the local priest. Adults might be skeptical or patiently amused, but even a child who fears such a reaction usually would not be able to avoid bursting with excitement and telling some­one. Why did this outgoing, exuberant girl who lived in a culture that believed readily in the supernatural and thirsted after favor­able signs keep this vision to herself? What we have here, I sus­pect, is an indication that even as a young girl Catherine began to develop the capacity to rely for inner strength solely on her per­sonal relationship with God, ignoring or opposing as necessary the dictates of the world around her. She cares very little for the confirmation and support of parents, friends, and confessors (and therefore becomes immune to their criticism as well/. While in earthly matters she is an obedient and good child, her soul, spirit, psyche, or what you will, is becoming hers alone, nourished by a fusing of God's design and her ego that she alone interprets and arbitrates.31

 

From biographies written after her death and intended to show that a supernatural light shone upon her from her earliest years we cannot expect to extract a full psychological portrait of Catherine's development. And yet the fragments we have are quite rich. Others have noticed, and at this point their work deserves mention, how early she expressed a strong sense of self. When Catherine was about ten her mother scolded her for coming home late from an errand. She had stopped off to pray at a local church and may have lost track of the time as she went through her prayers and attended Mass. Upon her return Lapa greeted Catherine with: "Cursed be the evil tongues that said you would never come back!" And the child responded:

My lady mother, when I do less or more than what you require of me I beg you to beat me as much as you will, so that I may be more careful another time; this is your right and your duty. But I beg you not to let your tongue curse other folk, whether good or bad, for my shortcomings, because that would not befit your age, and would grieve me too much.

The modern scholar Arrigo Levasti rightly emphasizes the considerable moral sophistication and sense of self carried in this reply. By taking all guilt onto herself and willingly accepting physical punishment she effectively isolates herself from the psychological effects of obedience to her mother. It is Catherine the child, not Lapa the mother, who will determine the appropriate punishment, thereby changing its meaning completely and turning a beating into a personal moral triumph, one from which she might derive great psychic satisfaction.22

 

Catherine's religiosity, however, still was tentative. We are told that she formed a group of playmates who secretly flagellated themselves using ropes tied into knots. Such imitation of an adult practice not unknown in a Siena driven to extremes in the aftermath of the plague suggests misplaced enthusiasm on Catherine's part. Taming of the flesh for her never would be a group activity; she was engaging in a painful game, but still a game. On one occasion she decided to become a hermit and with a bit of bread took off beyond her sister's house to what she thought should be an appropriate desert. For an entire day she sat in a grotto and concentrated her most fervent prayers that her vision of the radiant Jesus should return. Instead, she felt herself levitate and feared that this was the work of the devil. Hungry, tired, and very confused she returned home to her parents that same evening. Perhaps she simply told a little fib and said that she had gone to see her sister, for no one even bothered to question where she had been all day. At some point, most likely on the day of her first communion, she secretly vowed her virginity to Mary. How many hundreds of Sienese girls had the same thoughts we cannot know, but Catherine's promise certainly was not exceptional, nor was she prepared emotionally at that stage to act on it in a meaningful way.23

Considering that all the firsthand accounts we have of Catherine's childhood were written by people who believed she was a saint and worked for her canonization, the most remarkable thing about them is how ordinary they are. Ritual prayer, fascination with tales of heroic saints, an easily explained and certainly benign vision, an episode of running away for a few hours to a cave, an impulsive consecration of her virginity, a period of group-inflicted physical punishments -- certainly these are not so unusual for mid‑fourteenth century Siena, nor, with minor modification of the cultural details, for children in our own time. There are traces of a desire for solitude and a personalized sense of guilt for the sins of others, but most observers correctly saw Catherine as an obedient, happy, outgoing child.

 

So also the stories of her brief interlude with outright worldliness ring true. When Catherine was about twelve her ever-practical mother began to prepare her for marriage. This meant keeping after her to scrub her face and put on makeup, and teaching her to dye her hair blond and curl it. Such prettiness did not sit well with the child and so the exasperated Lapa called upon her married daughter Bonaventura, the very sister whom Catherine had been visiting when she experienced her first vision several years earlier, to try to bring the girl into line. Where Lapa's nagging had been rather ineffective and even counterproductive, the more patient Bonaventura seemed to have success. The older sister made Catherine understand that every young woman had a right to adorn herself and that such beautification was in no way displeasing to God. The girl much admired and loved Bonaventura, and under no circumstances could she consider her sister's advice sinful. Gradually Catherine became more worldly, yet never evil or unmindful of the Church's teachings, a shy and hesitant participant in the doings of Siena but increasingly a participant. This slow turning from childish religious exuberance to adolescent reality continued for two or three years, during which time Catherine's vow to preserve her virginity for God may less have been abandoned than relegated to a clear but not pressing memory. Both Giacomo and Lapa were happy at the prospect of a devout and proper daughter who soon would make a good wife. Whether Catherine was in accord with this design we do not know; in her later years she denied any wavering of her true intentions, yet in reality she appeared to be following in the footsteps of her pious yet worldly sister.24

 

Then everything changed. Bonaventura died in childbirth; the date listed in the burial register of San Domenico is August 10, 1362, so that Catherine was about fifteen. Death was not an uncommon or hidden experience in fourteenth‑century Siena, yet for Catherine the blow must have been severe. The elder sister she so admired, whose ways and good counsel she slowly learned to accept, was dead, a victim of an earthly woman's main purpose, certainly according to Lapa's example. Catherine's biographers convey an essential fragment of her reaction; the future saint blamed herself for Bonaventura's death, convinced herself that it was her own brief flirtation with worldliness that had brought God's just wrath not upon her but upon her sister. Once again, as in her infancy, Catherine lived in the place of another. This time she was old enough to respond in ways that would make everyone notice.25

 

Immediately she turned inward, meditated deeply upon how her sin had brought about the death of someone she loved, and determined to have no more to do with the world. But her parents and brothers were of a different persuasion. "They put it in their heads to acquire a new in‑law by finding a husband for Catherine at all cost. Spurred by the loss of their other daughter, they wanted to repair the damage immediately with the live one" is how Raymond of Capua sums up their wishes. The description sounds as if it comes from one of Catherine's general confessions; she understood that she was to be the next asset placed in her family's business. To whom was she to be wed? We cannot be certain. However, from I miracoli di Caterina, an anonymous panegyric written during Catherine's stay in Florence in 1374 when she appeared before the annual general meeting of the Dominican Order, we learn that Lapa openly discussed the possibility that Catherine might have wed none other than Niccolò Tegliacci, the dead Bonaventura's husband. He too was a dyer, and an important personage in  the political faction to which the Benincasas belonged; all that we know of their ways suggests that finances counted heavily. The technical problem of marrying one's brother‑in‑law was real but surmountable, especially considering the precarious state of the family enterprise, and the psychological implications certainly never occurred to anyone but Catherine. In her old age Lapa may have realized what a saint her daughter was, but her own testimony reveals that as a concerned mother she considered her teenager little more than a potential investment, apparently worth a dowry price in order to maintain an ally in the dyeing trade. Theirs was a family business, and the family's needs at this point were obvious.26

 

Certainly Niccolò's character was not one Catherine could have admired, and to the extent that to her he seemed typical of any prospective husband it becomes understandable that she wished to marry no man. Early in his marriage to Bonaventura he often had his friends at the house and all quickly fell into ribald jokes and foul language. Much to his bride's dismay, for she never had heard such words at home, he started cursing habitually. At this Bonaventura became physically ill and "visibly thin," and warned Niccolò that unless he changed his ways he soon would see her dead. He reformed and prohibited his companions from using bad words in his wife's presence, yet she died anyway.27

 

The evidence here is necessarily fragmentary and inferential -- parents clearly devoted to making money, a dead sister and an attached, rather old and uncouth, but influential brother‑in‑law of the same trade, an utter revulsion for marriage by a girl who before had been groping toward acceptance of the world, a child now twice burdened directly and personally with the guilt of being a survivor, the recurring alternative of radical holiness. And yet one or another detail may be stricken from this scenario and still outcome makes sense. Following the death of her older sister, for which she blamed herself, Catherine was repelled by all worldliness, absolutely refused to take any bridegroom but Christ, and entered upon the conquest of her body.

 

During the months of this emotional trial there occur yet another event of which we may be certain while remaining conjectural about its full impact. On April 18, 1363, less than a year after Bonaventura’s death in childbirth, and when Catherine was sixteen, Nanna died. Nanna, the sister who "replaced" Catherine's dead twin Giovanna, must have been about fourteen years old. Of her Catherine's biographers have hardly a word to say. Yet a simple chronology shows that it was precisely after Nanna's death that Lapa's efforts to get Catherine to marry became extreme and that this only surviving daughter gained the strength to say no clearly. Why this silence, and the generally distant or obviously hostile relations between Catherine and her family? Seldom was Catherine able to divulge even to her most intimate confessors all the details of her extended adolescent crisis, and her direct words about family members or letters to them are few indeed. A key to understanding how Catherine steeled herself against the deep sense of personal guilt that came from living on when so many she loved were dying is to be found by skipping briefly to an episode that occurred seven years later, in October 1370.28

 

Lapa was gravely ill, and Catherine beseeched God for her mother's recovery. Her prayer is certainly importunate and surprisingly arrogant as well if one remembers that she addressed it directly to God:

Father, this is not what you promised me: that all my family would be saved. Now my mother is dead without confession; therefore I pray you to return her to me. This I want, and I will not move from here until you have restored her to me.

She does not pray; she insists (hoc volo et numquam recedam hinc nisi reddas eam michi) that God live up to his end of the bargain and keep his promise, that he not "defraud" her. When, we may ask, did Catherine and God make this deal, this contract to exchange her worldly sacrifices for the salvation of "all" her family? The mentality here is not that of the mature, reflective Catherine but comes straight from her stubborn, theologically unsophisticated adolescence. Oppressed with personal guilt over her own survival and the deaths of her sisters, she achieved inner peace by conceiving in her mind a bargain for all eternity. She would not be a murderer but a savior: for her twin Giovanna, for her beloved Bonaventura, and for little Nanna. The price to be paid was great but not too great‑a life of hard penance and solitude. And when her parents, who could not be parties to this special arrangement of hers, objected to her austerities and tried to marry her off, Catherine not only forgave them but contracted to save them as well. Once the pact was made, to yield anything to their entreaties would be to damn them forever, and she loved them too much to do that. By her agreement with God the rebellious and troubled Catherine suddenly gained total power over Giacomo and Lapa, power in the next world that enabled her to defeat them in all struggles on earth.29

 

Fortified by a personal contract with God, Catherine sallied forth to do battle against the family she loved so much that nothing would stop her from saving them. Calmly she met with the local priest, Tommaso della Fonte, who was also a relative and whom her parents had enlisted to help bring her to her senses, and persuaded him of the sincerity of her religious vows. He suggested that if she truly were serious she should cut off her blond hair -- the one remaining symbol of prettiness belonging to an otherwise rather plain girl, and even this a false, bleached virtue. With "jubilation" Catherine took a pair of shears and chopped to the roots. Before returning home she donned a cap, perhaps in accordance with apostolic tradition and to hide at least temporarily her defiant gesture. As Catherine must have anticipated, Lapa immediately demanded to know the reason for this strange attire, and the girl, not wanting to lie outright, began muttering incomprehensibly. According to Raymond of Capua's account the infuriated Lapa tore off the cap, while another contemporary version has Catherine flinging it at her after a brief shouting match in which the ironically stupid mother threatened to pull out her daughter's hair. It hardly matters who pulled or flung what; Catherine's second war, "harsher than the first," had begun.30

 

Mother, father, and brothers all determined to teach the girl a lesson, to break her will and make her agree to do as they wanted. Their concern was discipline, not salvation. Raymond quotes them, a composite of words that appears to come from Catherine's recollections: "Vilest girl, you cut off your hair, but do you think perhaps that you are not going to do what we wish? Despite your not wanting it, your hair will grow back and even if your heart should break, you will be forced to take a husband; you will have no peace until you have done our will." They backed their words with action, taking away her separate room where she had spent hours in brooding meditation, nightly vigils, and secret self‑flagellations in imitation of Christ's passion. Henceforth she would sleep in her brother Stefano's room and serve the family's needs day and night. Maybe a heavy dose of sewing, washing, and cooking would help her to see how foolish she was and encourage her to act as other girls her age did. They even found a nice young man for her and harped constantly that she should get to know him better.31

 

Catherine's response was a timeless one for a troubled adoles­cent who truly becomes a man or woman. She could not fight the physical forces brought to oppress her, but with sufficient mental effort she would change their meaning. Raymond of Capua, in sev­eral of his most astute paragraphs, explains how Catherine came to realize that a private room would be unnecessary if she could construct for herself an interior oratory. He recalls how poorly he had understood her advice to him when he had been burdened with worldly cares: "Build a cell in your mind, from which you can never escape." It was as an adolescent that Catherine built her mental fortress, and if in many ways she became its prisoner (as Raymond inadvertently but I believe correctly reveals, the ora­tory proved impenetrable to the world around her. In her mind her father represented Jesus, her mother Mary, her brothers and other relatives the apostles and disciples; to serve them became an occa­sion for spiritual joy and growth.32

 

Months went by until Catherine, strengthened and consoled by a vision of Saint Dominic that clarified her sense of direction, called her parents and brothers together. She spoke cautiously but with absolute determination. For a long time they had gone for­ward with their marital plans for her, even entering into formal dowry negotiations, while she had remained silent out of the re­spect that is owed to parents. But the time for silence was over. She had from her earliest years promised her virginity to Jesus and Mary, a vow made not capriciously but after long reflection. She continued:

 

Now that by the grace of God I have reached an age of discre­tion and have more wisdom, know well that in me certain things are so firm that it would be easier to soften a rock than to tear them from my heart. It is useless for you to huff and puff, a waste of time, and therefore I advise you to blow on the wind any idea of marriage because there is no way I intend to accommodate you. I must obey God not men.

 

Her brothers and parents could find no words to answer the once taciturn and shy child who now spoke with such courageous wisdom, who seemed ready to leave her paternal household rather than break her vow. Her father Giacomo was the first to regain his composure. "God watch over you sweet daughter," he began; they

did not understand "but now we know with certainty that you are moved not by the whims of youth but by the impulse of divine love . . . Do as you please and as the holy Spirit instructs you." Then he turned to his wife Lapa and to his sons and ordered them: "No one is to bother my sweet daughter; no one is to try in any way to impede her; let her serve her Bridegroom as she pleases and pray ceaselessly for us."33

 

Giacomo allowed Catherine to have her own room back, where she would be free to "flagellate herself as much as she wanted." She never had cared much for meat and now gave it up entirely, developing a repugnance for its very odor. So also with wine in even the smallest amounts and with anything cooked except bread. Thus from the age of sixteen or so she subsisted on bread, water, and raw vegetables. She wore only rough wool and exchanged her hairshirt, the dirtiness of which offended her, for an iron chain bound so tightly against her hips that it enflamed her skin. For three years she observed a self‑imposed vow of total silence except for confession, and this she maintained even though she lived at home. With great difficulty she conquered fatigue and reduced her sleep to as little as thirty minutes every two days on a wooden board (perhaps a forgivable medieval exaggeration here, but the point is clear enough). Years later Raymond confessed that he would doze off as the animated Catherine talked on and on, and she would awaken him by demanding sharply whether she was speaking of God to a wall or to him. Three times a day she flagellated herself with an iron chain, once for her sins, again for the living, and then for the dead. Until she ultimately became too weak to continue this punishing routine, each beating lasted for one‑and‑one‑half hours and blood ran from her shoulders to her feet. When for whatever reason she could not speak of God or do his work she became understandably weak and lifeless, but if her heart was in some task she appeared youthful, energetic, and jovial. These harsh austerities quickly began to take their toll. Her mother recalled that Catherine had been so healthy and strong that she could hoist the load of an ass (another overstatement) on her shoulder and carry it easily up two long flights of stairs to the attic of their home. Then the once sturdy girl within a short time lost half her body weight.34

 

Lapa recognized the change from its inception, heard her daughter beating herself with the iron chain, and cried out: "Daughter, I see you already dead; without a doubt you will kill yourself. Woe is me! Who has robbed me of my daughter?" Lapa became half‑crazed, scratching herself and pulling out her hair as if her child in fact were dead at her feet. Notwithstanding Giacomo's or­ders to leave the girl in peace, the anguished mother tried to do what little she could to halt Catherine's apparent course of self-­destruction. In order that her daughter not sleep on a wooden board, Lapa took the child into her own bed. But Catherine would wait until the distraught woman had fallen asleep and then sneak back to her own room to continue her spiritual disciplines; when Lapa found her out the girl hid a sharp stick of wood under the sheet so that even at her mother's side she could torment her body. This subterfuge too Lapa soon discovered but her will was no match for Catherine's; seeing that opposition only made her daugh­ter more stubborn, Lapa decided to "close her eyes and let the girl sleep wherever she wanted."35

 

Catherine at this time was depressed and felt constantly as­saulted by evil spirits; she cried a great deal and worried that she would not be able to maintain her vow of virginity against the pressures of her family unless she was allowed to join the Domini­can Order. The particular Congregation she wished to join was the Sisters of Penance, commonly called the Mantellata for the long black mantle they wore over their usual Dominican white habit. It was a tertiary, or lay, group of women, nearly all widows who lived at home in the world rather than in the seclusion of a convent. Catherine's choice was somewhat unusual -- the obvious path for a fourteenth‑century Sienese girl in her circumstances being a nunnery -- one that puzzled her biographers and to which we shall return shortly. Her mother too was distressed by the deci­sion, and yet her husband's orders to let Catherine be meant that Lapa had to act discreetly. She proposed that she and Catherine go to the hot springs of nearby Vignoni. There, removed a bit from worldly cares, Catherine might reduce the severity of her aus­terities and feel less depressed; her rapport with her mother might improve."36

 

The bathing cure did not work at all. Under the pretense of ob­taining its full effect Catherine edged toward the canals along which the hot sulfuric water flowed into the pool where other bathers stayed and there she scalded her body and inflicted more pain upon herself than she had at home with the iron chain. When others tried to prevent her from so doing, she simply bathed only at hours when no one else was in the water. Upon their return to Siena, Catherine immediately resumed her penitential routines and began pestering her mother daily to go to the Sisters of Penance and beg them not to refuse her admission. This Lapa finally did, but to her satisfaction and Catherine's dismay, the Sisters declined, saying that the vestition of a young virgin would be "inopportune."37

 

Then Catherine became ill with a high fever and boils (or more precisely, according to Raymond of Capua, small subcutaneous hemorrhages) all over her skin. She had some form of pox com­mon among youths of her age, originating more from "exuber­ance" than from "exhaustion" and apparently not related directly to her austerities, with the possible exception of the boiling water "cure" she recently had undergone. Lapa stood vigil at her daugh­ter's bedside, applying what remedies she could and trying to con­sole her with soothing words. But Catherine saw her illness and her mother's concern as an ideal occasion to force Lapa to accede to her wishes and said over and over again: "If you wish me to get better, make it possible for me to join the Sisters of Penance. Otherwise I fear greatly that God and Saint Dominic, Who are calling me to do their holy work, will make certain that you can­not have me anymore, neither in one habit nor the other.”38

 

The frightened Lapa returned to beg the Sisters of Penance on Catherine's behalf, this time with an earnestness that we may well surmise had been absent on her previous visit. They still were apprehensive but agreed that if the girl was not too pretty, and in view of the ardent desire of both mother and daughter, they would consider the matter. "But if she is too pretty, as we have said already, we are afraid of falling into some scandal arising from the malignity of men, who now rule in this world; and in this case there is no way we can accept her." And Lapa responded, "Come have a look, and judge for yourself." Two, maybe four, of the wisest widows in the Congregation went with Lapa to Catherine's bedside. They found a girl who was plain anyway and now dis­figured by pox, and with so fervid a desire to join them in the ser­vice of God that all were astounded. Everyone agreed that as soon as the child became well Lapa should bring her to the church of San Domenico to be formally vested as a Sister of Penance. Within only a few days Catherine fully recovered, and over the futile last­minute objections of her mother, received the black‑over‑white Mantellata habit.39

 

Catherine's choice raises a series of questions that go to the core of the present effort to understand the personality of this holy anorexic. Why did she choose to be a tertiary instead of tak­ing the second orders for which her youthful virginity made her an appropriate candidate? Why did she choose to live as a layperson in the world when her intense need for privacy seemingly would have been fulfilled more easily in a cloister? Why does her mother loom so large in the entire story, so much so that in Raymond of Capua's version Catherine's decision appears to be merely a constant while the drama revolves around Lapa's conversion and slow acceptance of the inevitable? Raymond, of course, begins and ends with supernatural causation -- Catherine's vision of Saint Dominic directed her to join the Sisters of Penance, and so it came to be. Other dutiful hagiographers have speculated that Catherine's profound humility made her feel unworthy of becoming a nun and so she joined the lesser ranks of Dominican tertiaries. However, nothing that we know of Catherine's personality and of her actions on earth at any stage of her life even remotely supports such a hypothesis. More plausible is the conclusion that Catherine chose to become a tertiary precisely so that she could be active in the world and exert her considerable talents to save the Church from its malaise, that from the outset her vocation was public and reforming rather than private and penitential. Reasonable though this explanation is, it is less than fully satisfactory because it assigns to Catherine a public role that at the time of her choice she appears not even to have contemplated and because it ignores the familial context of her adolescent decision."40

 

As a girl in her late teens Catherine decided to live at home, but in a Dominican habit complemented with a long black mantle showing that she was dedicated to a life of penance. Penance for what? And why join a congregation that, in Siena at least, was intended primarily for widows? If her choice was not merely capricious or spiteful, and I think there was more to it than that, the answer to these questions may be found by returning to the themes of death, survival, salvation, and redemption. Catherine lived when others had died and she believed that her graces in this world might ameliorate the just punishment of her loved ones in the next. Her task was yet more arduous, for she had contracted to save all her family; she would live among the very people for whose salvation she was joyously ready to perform any sacrifice. First among these was her mother, an obdurate, impatient sinner whom she loved dearly and who therefore had to bow totally to her daughter's will and beg the Sisters of Penance to let her child join them.41

 

Already we have seen that Catherine's conversion to radical asceticism came at the time of the deaths of her sisters Bonaventura and Nanna. Her later insistence that her mother not die when the state of her soul would have condemned her to eternal punishment conveys the further sense of a girl totally dedicated to the spiritual welfare of her family. Now let us consider Catherine’s response to the death of her father. He became gravely ill some time in 1368, when Catherine was about twenty‑one. More than anyone else in her family, he had tried to understand her strange behavior, and he alone truly had recognized her special needs and given them space. They spoke at length, and Catherine realized that he was ready to die, that he was at peace with himself. She prayed not for his recovery but that he should be spared his due time in purgatory so that he might join immediately the company of saints in heaven. The response Catherine received was legalistic in tone; while he certainly had been a good man and a loving father, Giacomo had lived too fully in the muck of worldly sin; the requirements of eternal justice meant that some price had to be paid. Catherine meditated upon this response and determined upon yet another contract with God. In exchange for her father's immediate place in heaven she would take on the burden of his just punishments right here on earth. This God granted, and at Giacomo’s death in August 1368 Catherine received both the consolation of a vision showing him among the celestial beings and a sharp pain in her hip. The ache remained with her “continually” until the moment of her own death. But it was a price Catherine happily paid for the release of her beloved father from the torments of purgatory. More than a century later the humanist Giovanni Francesco Pico retold with awe the story of Catherine’s superhuman dedication to the salvation of her family.42

           

The symbolism and the psychological transference shown here, coming as they do from the unintentional wisdom of her devoted biographers, reveal nonetheless a troubled young woman and a solution that extends beyond her particular time and place. Catherine’s holy anorexia, as with the other aspects of her religious impulse, developed in a familial context. For the love she received from a belatedly understanding father and an all-too-worldly mother she felt obligated to be a good girl, so good and so special that her sacrifices in this world would save their souls in the next. To relieve herself of the burden of God’s favor in allowing her to live when her sisters had died she became His humblest servant and dedicated herself totally to His work. She conquered the drives of appetite, sex, sleep, and all material comfort; and if her punishments quickly took their physical toll, her will shaped the meaning of what she was doing. To live at home as a tertiary allowed her to play out the drama of her life in the only context that really meant anything to her. And when her world did grow larger to include popes, kings, and queens, she wrote to them and understood them as family folk. She was "Mamma" to her disciples, and Pope Gregory she addressed as "Babbo." And when she scolded him for his irresolution she especially added that he was her dolcissimo Babbo ("sweetest Daddy"), just as any adolescent girl growing wise to the imperfections of her father would do.43

 

With Giacomo's death the Benincasa home as Catherine had known it in her youth came to an end. Her brothers suffered a series of misfortunes. In Siena in early September 1368 a revolt broke out against the government of Twelve and its supporters, including the Benincasas, and it was Catherine who saved her brothers from death or imprisonment by leading them to a hiding place at the local hospital of Santa Maria. Several days later, after some order had been restored, they emerged and paid a fine of 100 gold florins to "remain at peace." Brothers Bartolo and Benincasa again accepted calls to participate in town governance, but new political convulsions led them to flee permanently from Siena, and on October 14, 1370, they petitioned for citizenship in Florence. There, with a third brother, Stefano, they tried to build their fortune by expanding a dyeing shop they had established years earlier. Their chances in Florence may have been poor from the outset, for there was firm opposition to their citizenship, and a letter dated October 7, 1373, from the priors of the woolen guild and the gonfalons of justice of Florence to the Republic of Siena asked its aid in forcing Benincasa and Bartolo, along with the heirs of the deceased Stefano, to pay debts totaling over 875 gold florins. By the fifteenth century the family had need of public charity, thus fulfilling Catherine's prayer that her brothers all be impoverished rather than realize the fruits of illicit monetary gains. The gulf between Catherine's asceticism and her brothers' worldliness was unbridgeable; her few letters to them are brief, formal, even icy, and scolding. If her holiness ultimately rescued their souls, Catherine never had the consolation of a vision revealing it to her."44

 

With Lapa she had a bit more success, at least in exterior form, and her mother eventually took the habit of the Sisters of Penance, thus following explicitly her daughter's path. But their spirits remained very different. When she was absent from Siena Catherine would write to her mother occasionally, but the letters, at least those portions we have, cannot have brought Lapa much consolation. They gave little news of what she was doing nor did they ask about those left behind in Siena. Instead, they uniformly urged Lapa to learn to be more patient, to abandon more completely worldly concerns, to think only of God. No hints of remorse came through on Catherine's part over how totally she had broken her mother's will and gone her own way. She could express tender affection for her mother's spiritual welfare, but never for her earthly tribulation. Lapa apparently had complained of Catherine's long absence, to which her daughter responded:

 

You know that it becomes me to follow the will of God; and I know that you wish that I follow it. His will was that I should depart [from Siena to Avignon, a departure not without mystery nor without very useful results. It was his will that I remain and not the will of man; whoever says the contrary is a liar and is not truthful. . . You, like a good and sweet mother, should be happy, and not disconsolate, to bear every burden for the honor of God and your health and mine. Remember what you did for temporal goods when your sons left you to seek worldly riches; now you find the quest for life eternal so tiring that you say you will be reduced to nothingness if I do not answer you quickly. All this happens to you because you love more that part of me which comes from you, that is your body from which you formed me, than the part I have taken

from God. Lift, lift your heart and your affection a little to that sweet and holy cross where every burden is lightened. Wish to bear a little finite pain to escape the eternal punishment we deserve for our sins.

 

Only after this rebuke did Catherine assure her mother that she would be back soon and was delayed only because some members of her entourage had been sick. Even when she was in Siena, Catherine chose for weeks and months at a time to live not at home in Lapa's company but at the house of her dear friend Alessia, a widow a few years older than herself and also a Mantellata. Only months after her daughter had transferred to Rome in 1378 with an assemblage of more than two dozen disciples and friends did Lapa follow Catherine there, and during the three months of Catherine's terminal illness it was the dying daughter who prayed for her mother's soul, not the reversal that one might expect.''45

 

On January 1, 1380, as Catherine meditated on Christ's circumcision and the preciousness of his every drop of blood, she determined to add to her austerities by drinking no water. The saint had been in a state of depression for some time. Pope Urban VI, in whom she had placed such hope after Gregory XI's death, turned out to be a stubborn, willful, unloving, even spiteful man, quite unsuited to the delicate task of keeping the Papacy in Rome and heading off the rapidly deepening schism within the Church. At first he had seemed to want Catherine's advice, but then he stopped listening to her, at best tolerating her idealism in ways that this shrewd woman quickly saw through. Some disciples gathered around her to launch a community of spiritual perfection that would support Urban VI and that by its example was to reform the world, but many others she held dear did not heed her call. They thought society was hopelessly corrupt, that the effort was doomed to failure, and so they remained in their private cells and attended to saving their own souls. Catherine of Sweden, also venerated as a saint, flatly refused to join Catherine's proposed mission to Queen Giovanna of Naples to persuade her to support Pope Urban. Her ambassadorial plans thwarted, Catherine instead wrote a volley of letters, but nothing moved the Queen from her wicked life of private vice and public opposition to the Papacy. Even her beloved friend and confessor Raymond feared so much for his bodily welfare that he lingered in Genoa, refusing to continue on to Avignon and face the glories of martyrdom to which Catherine urged him. And in Rome itself mobs gathered to shout their hostility toward Urban and his followers, threatening them with physical harm. Visions of the Church in ruin tormented Catherine daily, all because Gregory XI had followed her advice and left France.

 

The logic of her life trapped Catherine and broke her emotionally. If in urging Gregory to return to Rome she had been doing God's will, it was impossible that the result now should be the Church's destruction. Therefore it must have been her will all along, an admission she never would allow. Desolate, she made a supreme sacrifice, for she must have known that the refusal to drink water would kill her. This time, however, she made no contract with God, did not exert her will or conclude with hoc volo. That God should save the Church she only could beg: "Here is my body which I acknowledge as coming from Thee and I now offer it to Thee; may it be an anvil for Thy beatings, to atone for their sins." After a total physical collapse on January 29, 1380, during which Catherine probably suffered convulsions and then may have gone into a coma, she finally ended her complete hunger strike. But the punishment had its effect upon her already debilitated body and exactly three months later she died. Her final days were filled with the agonies of great pain, tormenting devils, self-doubts, and fear for the Church's future. Yet she was serene, trusting that no matter how gloomy the world's prospects, soon she would be united in eternity with her bridegroom.46

 

The accomplishments that led Catherine Benincasa to become known as the Saint Catherine of Siena, co‑patron with Francis of Assisi of all Italy and a Doctor of the Church with the same official status as Thomas Aquinas -- miraculous healing of plague victims, prodigious charity, tireless exhortation of churchmen to return to Christianity's true precepts, constant peacemaking efforts ranging from Avignon to Pisa, Lucca, and Florence, authorship of The Dialogue of Divine Providence – obviously are not within the primary focus of the present study. It is my firm hope and conviction that an effort to understand in a historical and psychological context the person who did so much in no way detracts from an appreciation of her efforts in themselves. Concerning her personality, I offer the following summary, supported where possible by materials discussed in this chapter.

Catherine's infancy left her with an enormous capacity for faith and with a very strong need for autonomy. She recalled consciously neither the joys of being a favored child at her mother's breast nor the pains of its denial during the frightening days of the Black Death and then the abandonment she must have experienced when Lapa became pregnant once more and had to devote her attention to the new Nanna. But these infant experiences had a potential impact on her personality; this impact became actual during Catherine's adolescence when her mother, who thoroughly misunderstood her and stubbornly refused to let her go her own way, tried to bring Catherine to obedience by making‑filial devotion the price owed for past love. Catherine indeed did love her mother deeply, and she did feel obligated to pay back all her worldly debts, to be free of them as she would be free of all earthly things, else she could not truly be autonomous. The solution to the dilemma of balancing her great faith/dependency against her drive for free will/autonomy, and to the burden of surviving in the place of her three dead sisters, came through sacrifice, penance, and God. She became totally His servant, and therefore refused to serve men on earth, even while she humbly attended to their worldly needs and obeyed their commands. From the three‑year moratorium of silence and fasting at home which she imposed on herself when she was sixteen she emerged convinced that she had achieved a direct and personal relationship with God. Once she had persuaded herself of the reality of this favored position she was ready to take on the world. Through prayers that sounded more like market transactions, including words such as "defrauded" and "established terms," she believed she had rescued her father from purgatory and her mother from hell. However much was owed, she had repaid it fully.

Her anorexia did not in itself determine the path of her religious expression, nor the reverse. Rather, the entirety of her active and seeking asceticism developed out of a personality forged in a familial context that Catherine never abandoned. The stages of her loss of appetite closely paralleled the turning points in her family relations, points that in turn coincided with advances in her total conquest of self. She had been a robust, happy, obedient child; then her two sisters died and Catherine restricted her diet to bread, water, and raw vegetables. Her actions at this time, including also flagellation, efforts to overcome fatigue, and absolute silence, probably remained under her fully conscious control. Yet she felt that her penances never were severe enough and that she was an unworthy sinner who had not tamed her unruly flesh. Her soul continued to be tormented by demons, and she felt in no position to save even herself much less the family she loved. Following the death of her father, however, she experienced a surge of confidence about the special nature of her rapport with God. Consoled by a vision revealing to her that by taking on earthly tribulation she had earned him an immediate place in heaven, Catherine experienced mystical union and believed she wore a bridal ring placed directly on her finger by Jesus and Mary. At the same time, and now beyond her conscious control, she lost her appetite and stopped eating even bread; no longer did she need to sleep. So fully confident was she that she had conquered her body that when her mother became gravely ill Catherine did not beg but virtually warned God to keep his part of their supernatural contract and restore Lapa's health.

 

Catherine then turned her efforts to saving the Church by returning the Papacy to Rome and launching a crusade. At first she seemed to experience some success, just as she had in saving her family. Gregory XI, whom she consistently addressed as dolcissimo Babbo, had the same sort of admiration and awe of Catherine's special holiness that her father Giacomo had expressed, and when he did in fact leave Avignon Catherine's triumph of will seemed complete. Growing beyond the role of adoring daughter, she felt emboldened enough to gather a band of disciples around her and become their "Mamma." She valued her spiritual experiences enough to take time out to dictate them to a train of secretaries and she gave advice freely to kings and queens, whether or not they asked for it. At this time she entered an eating/vomiting pattern typical of acute anorexia.

 

With the election of Urban VI her efforts at Church reform came to a dismal end. The Avignon papacy gave way to the yet more scandalous Great Schism, and even some of her disciples refused to answer their "Mamma's" call to join her at Rome in establishing a community of religious perfection. Exhausted by her austerities and broken emotionally by her failure to reform the Church, Catherine's will to live gave way to an active readiness for death. She contributed directly to that outcome by not drinking water for nearly a month. The self‑imposed dehydration had its effect, and Catherine entered her deathbed. She lingered on for three months, suffering greatly and experiencing only brief periods of full lucidity. During this time her adolescent uncertainties returned, and she was tormented by fear that all her work had been for naught. In semidelirious states she shouted out "Vainglory no, but the true glory and praise of God, yes," denying to herself a truth revealed by the very passion with which she refused it. In the end she had committed the sin of vainglory and had starved herself to death. It had been her will, not His, that had triumphed all these years and that now lay vanquished.47

 

1. Caterina (Santa) da Siena (Caterina Benincasa), Epistolario di Santa Caterina a cura di Eugenio Dupré Theseider, vol. 1 (Rome, 1940), letter number 92 (using Tommaseo’s numbering). This edition remains incomplete but is most valuable for the critical notes on letters it does contain. For other letters, nearly four hundred in all, see Caterina (Santa) da Siena (Caterina Benincasa), Le lettere di S. Caterina da Siena ridotte a nuova lezione a in ordine nuovo disposte con note di Niccolò Tommaseo a cura di Piero Misciattelli, 6 vols. (Siena, 1913-21; reprint ed., Florence, 1939‑40). Useful notes also will be found in Girolamo Gigli, L'opere di Santa Caterina da Siena, 4 vols. (Siena and Lucca, 1707-21). A more readily available complete edition, unfortunately with introductory essays that are not always historically accurate, is Santa Caterina da Siena, Epistolario (Rome, 1979). Only sixty‑four of the letters currently are available in English translations in Vida D. Scudder, ed., Saint Catherine of Siena as Seen in Her Letters (London, 1905). On translation problems and forthcoming complete English editions see Suzanne M. Noffke, "Translating the Works of Catherine of Siena into English: Some Basic Considerations," in Congresso Internazionale di Studi Cateriniani (CISC), Atti (Rome, 1981), pp. 470‑82. For his unstinting assistance on this and other translations I am indebted to Professor Joseph Chierici of Rutgers University.

2. Raimundus Capuani, "Legenda maior" in Acta Sanctorum, April vol. 3, para. 167. Hereafter cited as Raymond of Capua, Legenda, followed by the paragraph numbering used in the Acta and in the more worthy translations and commentaries on this work. A good scholarly yet officially approved full‑length modern biography of Catherine is Innocenzo M. Taurisano, Santa Caterina da Siena: Patrona d'Italia (Rome, 1948); see esp. pp. xviii‑xlviii, 35-50 and 208-15, for various points discussed in this chapter; also see Giorgio Papasogli, Sangue e fuoco sul ponte di Dio (Rome, 1971). The excessive nature of Catherine's fasting encouraged lively controversy even centuries ago. In his multivolume Histoire ecclesiastique the Abbot of Fleuri concluded that Catherine's many visions were a direct consequence of her inability or refusal to eat. This position was sharply contested in Ambrogio Tantucci, Dissertazione teologico‑critica del P. Maestro F. Ambrogio Ansano Tantucci dell' Ordine de' Predicatori, In cui risponde colla Dottrina specialmente de S. Tommaso D'Aquino a cio, che si legge nella storia ecclesiastica dell' Abate di Fleuri spettante alla serafica Santa Caterina di Siena, Ed ai Direttori della medesima (Milan, 1749), esp. pp. 20-36.

3. The fundamental study of the sources for Catherine of Siena's life remains Robert Fawtier, Sainte Catherine de Sienne: Essai de critique des sources, vol. 1, Sources hagiographiques (Paris, 1921), and vol. 2, Les oeuvres de Sainte Catherine de Sienne (Paris, 1930). For five centuries before the appearance of Fawtier's work, no one had brought a deeply critical, secular, historical spirit to an examination of the problems raised by Raymond of Capua's Legenda and related materials. By the very ferocity of his relentless questioning of everything, Fawtier spurred scholars to return to the basic documents and examine them more closely. The result has been an outpouring of meticulous and sometimes exhaustingly detailed works that continues to the present day. Lina Zanini, Bibliografia analitica di S. Caterina da Siena, 1901‑1950 (Rome, 1971), which by no means is complete, gives over 1000 entries. As with most historical documents, the Legenda can be used but must be subjected to appropriate methods of verification. A case in point relevant to the analysis that follows is the matter of Catherine's date of birth. Raymond of Capua gave her age at death in 1380 as thirty‑three, the same age as Jesus Christ. For Raymond this was another sign of her sanctity, one that later faithful admirers, especially "Caffarini," embellished. Fawtier suspected a trick and built an elaborate argument that Catherine was born sometime between  1333 and 1338, a decade or more earlier than her traditionally assumed birth year. To support his contention, Fawtier turned Raymond into a mastermind at selectively manipulating and destroying telltale documents, brushed aside the internally inconsistent dates of an anonymous panegyric whose historical value he greatly overestimated, misread a list of names by claiming it referred to a single year when close examination shows this to be highly improbable, and asserted that Catherine's efforts to foil her family's plans to marry her off came when she was twenty‑five or thirty years old and had been a Dominican tertiary for more than a decade. Perhaps nothing is impossible, but such a chronology makes little sense for fourteenth‑century Siena. All these and other points are explored at length in E. Jordan, "La date de naissance de Sainte Catherine de Sienne," Analecta Bollandiana 40 (1922): 365‑411. Also see Robert Fawtier and Louis Canet, La double experience de Catherine Benincasa (Paris, 1948), and Eugenio Dupre Theseider, "La duplice esperienza di S. Caterina da Siena," Rivista Storica Italiana 62, fasc. 4 (1950): 533‑74; and Francesco Valli, Saggi sulla letteratura religiosa italiana del trecento (Urbino, 1943), pp. 91 and 136‑55. The result is to reestablish on a firmer basis (given the absence of an actual birth register) 1347 as the most likely year of Catherine's birth but to be skeptical about assigning much significance to her age at death since neither she nor the disciples gathered around her did so in 1380. Generally Raymond of Capua interpreted and moralized a bit excessively, but he was writing about a life so extraordinary and about which so many popular tales already flourished that he hardly needed to add his own fictions.

On Catherine's appearance before a Dominican inquisitorial commission in Florence, see Innocenzo Taurisano, L'ambiente storico cateriniano (Siena, 1934); Fawtier, Sainte Catherine, I:92; Anonimo Fiorentino, 1 miracoli di S. Caterina da Siena, ed. Francesco Valli (1374; Florence, 1936), introduction; and for a reevaluation that convinces at least this reader that Fawtier was correct in concluding that Catherine was in real danger of being found guilty of heresy at this point, see Timoteo M. Centi, "Un processo inventato di sana pianta," S. Caterina fra i dottori della chiesa, ed. T. Centi (Florence, 1970), pp. 39-56.

On Raymond of Capua, see Fawtier, Sainte Catherine, I:118-30; and Giacinto M. Cormier, Il Beato Raimondo da Capua (Rome, 1900). On translation and publication of his biography see the recent edition of Giuseppe Tinagli (Siena, 1978), introduction by Giacinto D'Urso; and, more generally, Francesco Valli, "La mentalità agiografica del B. Raimondo da Capua," La Diana 8 (1933): 191-209. On hagiography and history, see Donald Weinstein and Rudolph M. Bell, Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom, 1000-1700 (Chicago, 1982), pp. 1-15. And for an anthropological perspective see Alessandro Falassi, La santa dell'oca: Vita, morte a miracoli di Catering da Siena (Milan, 1980), esp. pp. 13-16.

4. Raymond of Capua, Legenda,