The Life of Margaret of Cortona is a precious biography from the end of the 13th century detailing the life of a lay penitent woman living on the fringes of the early Franciscan movement. She continues to draw scholarly interest.

The Creation of a Franciscan Lay Saint: Margaret of Cortona and her Legenda
Mary Harvey Doyno, California State University, Sacramento
In: Past & Present Volume 228, Issue 1Pp. 57-91

ABSTRACT:

Margaret of Cortona (1247 -1297) was born in Laviano near Perugio but spent most of her adult life in Cortona. She was was an unmarried laywoman who, after living for years as the concubine of a nobleman from Montepulciano, she came to Cortona with her “illegitimate” son around 1272, seeking protection and spiritual help after the death of her lover had left her homeless.

Margaret of Cortona’s arrival in the city must have been the talk of the town. Within a few years of her arrival in the city, Margaret had asked the Cortonese Franciscans to allow her to wear their penitential habit, a decision that would not only mark her new dedication to a penitential life but also offer her an association with a religious order on the rise in the city.

Although the friars were at first sceptical — Margaret’s beauty and youth led them to question her commitment — they eventually relented, and in 1277 they allowed her to wear a habit that would mark her as a Franciscan lay penitent.

However, new research by Mary Harvey Doyno demonstrates that the Franciscans continued much longer than hitherto suspected to be sceptical about the religious fervour of this unattached woman with a scandalous past, who claimed to have visionary access to Christ. Penitents like her seem to have raised complex questions for the mendicant friars, whose early history was marred by struggles between factions trying to balance their respect fort Franciscan heritage with the need to be publicly recognised by the Papacy. In this situation any whiff of heresy attached to an adherent might complicate matters further and the Franciscans seem to have kept a much more marked distance to the would-be-saint than has hitherto been acknowledged. It was not until 1289 the penitents were formally organised inside “the Third order of Franciscans”.

In the end she was declared a delusional fraud and moved from her cell near the friary in town to take up residence in a dilapidated church outside Cortona at San Basilio, where she was eventually buried and where a local cult developed. The church was renamed Santa Margarita. She was not canonized until 1728.

We know quite a lot about her life thanks to the Legenda de vita et miraculis Beatae Margaritae de Cortona written by her confessor, fra Giunta Bevegnati. This is the most extensive biography of a Franciscan penitent, which exists.

READ MORE:

Legenda de Vita et Miraculis beatae Margaritae de Cortona
Ed. By Fortunato Iozzelli
Bibliotheca Franciscana Ascetica Medii Aevi, tom. 13.
Grottaferrata 1997
ISBN 8870131718
ISBN-13 9788870131710

Margherita of Cortona and the Lorrenzetti: Sienese Art and the Cult of a Holy Woman in Medieval Tuscany.
By Joanna Cannon and Andre Vauchez.
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999.
ISBN: 0-271-01756-2.

 

 

 

 

The Life and Miracles of Saint Margaret of Cortona (1247 – 1297), Translated by Thomas Renna and edited by Shannon Larson.
Saint Bonaventure, New York:
Franciscan Institute Publications 2012
ISBN: 9781576593011