Women of the Streets : Early Franciscan Women and their Mendicant Vocation

Chapter Two. Rose of Viterbo (d. 1251) A Franciscan Street Preacher

ChaPTer TWo rose of viTerbo (d. 1251) a franCisCan sTreeT PreaCher Rose of Viterbo was born around 1233 just a few years after Francis of Assisi died in 1226. Already by the time Rose was born, Francis’s influence was gaining a hold in Viterbo, the central Italian city where Rose lived. Friars established a church there by 1236 and were making a significant impression on the citizens. The Franciscans especially captured the imagination of one little girl named Rose, who imitated the friars by dressing up in a copy of their habit, insisting on having her hair shaved into the tonsure of a cleric, and begging her mother to secure for her thick rope to tie around her habit like the Franciscans did. But Rose’s pious dress-up was not something she just played at home. Clad in a habit tied Darleen pryDs 22 by the cord, Rose took to the streets and played the part of a friar by preaching. When Rose brought her pious followers back home to continue her spiritual teaching there, her parents objected. They tried to stifle their daughter’s passionate expressions of faith, but to no avail. Rose’s unselfconscious imitation of the friars captured the attention and imagination of her contemporaries and positioned her as someone who challenged social expectations of proper comportment for a girl and a young woman. But it was the audacious manner in which she used her imitation of the friars to voice opposition to Emperor Frederick II, the arch-enemy of the pope at the time, that raised the ante on the extent to which the girl would break from socially prescribed gender roles by voicing her truth as a girl who experienced faith so intensely that she would inspire and lead others. The story of Rose of Viterbo is a tale of a girl’s irrepressible desire to know God and her passionate expression of faith. But how we know about Rose and what we know about her goes far to explain the need for this book. While Rose was alive in the thirteenth century and in the two centuries after her death, she was known by the citizens of Viterbo as their inspiring civic preacher. Once she received official recognition as a saint in 1457, all texts, documents, and liturgies that were written to celebrate this lay Franciscan woman failed to retain references to the characteristic features of mendicancy, most notably itinerant preaching, that gives sense to her story as a lay Franciscan. Rehabilitating her story to its original fervor will bring a deeper appreciation of how laywomen participated in the Franciscan tradition at an early stage. ROSE OF VITERBO 23 The sourCes The life story of a young, medieval woman who died at the age of eighteen is rarely the kind of story that gets recorded. So how is it that we know about Rose? Ultimately, the answer to that question is that the people of Viterbo told and retold stories about Rose. Mothers and aunts told stories to children on their knees about the little girl who was a preacher. Lawyers and doctors talked about her and, no doubt, debated aspects of her fame while stopping to chat on street corners. And over dinner, families talked about her. The repeated act of telling stories about the girl’s faith cultivated and continued the deep appreciation that the people of Viterbo had for their little saint. But still, stories like these usually remain ephemeral in the form of chatting. While most of the stories told about Rose were never written down, we do see a glimpse of them in the canonization records of the fifteenth century.31 In these records testimonies were taken from leading citizens of the city, both men and women, all of whom talked freely and knowingly about the faith of the child even though she had died over 200 years earlier. When asked how they knew so much about her, they gave responses such as “I heard stories from my grandmother”; “My mother had told me stories when I was younger.” The stories that people told about Rose fostered and sustained the girl’s reputation for holiness for the two centuries between the time of her death and the time of the successful canonization. In some circles, people continue to retell these stories today. 31 On the testimonies taken at the girl’s canonization process, see G...