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  • How to Candy Oranges and Reprimand the Pope: Catherine of Siena’s Letter 346 to Urban VI
  • Cristina Mazzoni (bio)

There is a dessert, in Nigella Lawson’s 2004 book Feast, the recipe for which invariably gets requested whenever I make it: a moist and gluten-free chocolate orange cake, which sounds like a normal enough dessert . . . until you read the first step of its recipe: “Put the whole oranges in a pan with some cold water, bring to the boil and cook for 2 hours or until soft.”1 What? Boil “the whole oranges,” rind and all, with no initial preparation other than a perfunctory rinse, and for two full hours? Boiling oranges whole is not a common part of today’s typical preparation of citrus fruit, which more often involves zesting, peeling, squeezing, sectioning, and/or slicing. And yet, it is just how Catherine of Siena in fourteenth-century Italy describes the preparation of oranges in a letter she wrote to Pope Urban VI. In this letter, Saint Catherine (born Catarina Benincasa, Siena 1347-Rome 1380) writes about embracing the pleasing flavor of sweetness and, especially, about a more ambiguous relationship with the taste of bitterness—literal and metaphorical, botanical and human, desirable and undesirable, raw and cooked. Catherine writes in order to outline and recommend a plan of spiritual sweetening and religious renewal for a pope about whose ability to lead she had some grave concerns.

“To Urban VI. In the name of Jesus Christ crucified and of sweet Mary. Most holy and very sweet father in sweet Jesus Christ. . . .”2 Thus begins the 346th of Catherine’s about 380 extant letters, the largest collection of letters written by a woman in the Middle Ages, and one of the largest by either gender during that time period. Several of these numerous letters are addressed to Pope Urban VI, with letter 346 dating from August 1379—less than a year before Catherine’s death the following April 1380 and about a year after the beginning of Urban’s pontificate the previous April 1378. In addition to Urban VI, Catherine had written regularly to his predecessor, Pope Gregory XI; she also corresponded with family members, friends, followers, and a number of power brokers of her time, including Giovanna, Queen of Naples. Most of Catherine’s letters begin with a salutation similar to this one, namely, with either Mary or Jesus—or, as in this case, both—being described as “sweet” (“dolce,” in the original Italian). This is not so unusual, given that, as religious historian Rachel Fulton explains, “the association between Christ’s sacrifice [End Page 41]


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Fruit. Credit: Courtesy Anna Maria Pischedda

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and sweetness was to become more or less ubiquitous in the devotional writing and imagery of the later Middle Ages.”3 In these Christian texts, the word “sweet,” Fulton rightly insists, denotes physical flavor, rather than some intellectual abstraction of sweetness: the sweet taste of Jesus, physically ingested in the Eucharist, is the sensorial equivalent of the Truth that Christians are to make their own; indeed, Fulton points out, “taste is the last sensation we have before the Other becomes ourselves.”4 Human beings are wired to like sweetness, likely because sweetness is a sign of nutritious food such as, first and foremost, mother’s milk; sweetness, therefore, indicates what’s good for you. God too, then, tastes sweet; indeed, God provides the ultimate sweetness. Catherine’s repeated use of the adjective “dolce” in this particular epistolary opening, furthermore, acquires special significance in a text, such as letter 346, that revolves around the imagery of taste and thus provides a small example of what scholar Bernard McGinn describes as the “appeal to the spiritual senses [that] was a fundamental mode of expression in patristic and medieval mysticism.”5 That the pope himself, in this opening, should be described as “dolcissimo,” “very sweet,” is an ironic jab or wishful thinking at best on Catherine’s part, for Bartolomeo Prignano, pope under the name of Urban VI, was irascible, stubborn, and even, according to some, abnormally violent. He was not a sweet man, by any means.

Catherine...

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