Reclaiming Catherine of Siena: Literacy, Culture, and the Signs of Others by Jane Tylus (review)

In this provocative and stimulating study, Jane Tylus seeks to “reclaim” St. Catherine of Siena from the margins of Italian literary history, to which she has been consigned as an “illiterate” representative of an oral rather than textual culture. In her first chapter, Tylus aligns her project intriguingly with that of the eighteenth-century playwright, antiquarian, and Sienese patriot Girolamo Gigli. Gigli published Catherine’s writings and in his Vocabolario cateriniano championed Catherine in resistance to Florentine cultural hegemony. Tylus emphasizes how, for Gigli, Catherine’s use of the Sienese vernacular—a living language rather than “‘dead words’ found only in books” (p. 7)—made Catherine more than a match for the Florentine tre corone of Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarch, and Giovanni Boccaccio.

Gigli “was out to make Catherine someone we identify with texts” (p. 7). This is Tylus’s mission, too, and for both Gigli and Tylus, Catherine was a writer in the literal sense. Whereas Raymond of Capua’s authoritative account of Catherine’s life emphasizes her illiteracy and how she dictated her letters and her book, Il Dialogo (to which she referred simply as her Libro), to scribes, Gigli “discovered” the alternative hagiographical tradition of the Sienese Dominican Tommaso Caffarini, who asserted that Catherine could both read and write. Tylus (reasonably) accepts as genuine Catherine’s letter 272 from 1377, in which she announces to Raymond of Capua that in her sleep God has taught her to write. But her real interest is not so much in whether Catherine could write, as in what writing meant for Catherine.

This is a theme that Tylus explores in three chapters that focus on Catherine’s writings, linked to important moments in her career: her mission to Pisa in 1375; her 1377 sojourn in the Sienese contado with the Salimbeni family, during which she wrote letter 272 and evidently began work on her book; and her final trip to Rome, where she died in 1380. In each chapter, Tylus emphasizes a particular word or image and the constellation of associations and textual references that it might have evoked for Catherine and her readers. For example, Tylus discusses Catherine’s self-identification as an outspoken donna (modeled on Mary, but evoking echoes also of Dante’s Beatrice), and her meditations on bodies: her own, marked by (invisible) stigmata; Christ’s wounded body; and the textual body of a rubricated manuscript page. Tylus demonstrates in compelling fashion how, for Catherine, writing was a way to unite speech with deeds.

Tylus is sometimes on less sure ground when she evokes scene-setting details. The book includes a number of small historical inaccuracies and imprecisions, most of which are not important to her argument. But it should be noted that there is no evidence that Catherine was summoned to Florence in 1374 “because so many of her actions violated decorum and church policy” (p. 198) or that in Florence she underwent an “interrogation” (p. 89). (She was probably called there because the Dominicans intended to enlist her and her gifts on behalf of the papacy—as indeed they immediately did—and not because they suspected her of heresy.) Tylus sometimes exaggerates Catherine’s literary persona, as when she claims—without any source—that Catherine “insisted to her scribes” (p. 123) that her works circulate in the volgare rather than be translated into Latin. It is not necessary to attribute to Catherine such a Dantean preoccupation with the status of the volgare to show, as Tylus has done conclusively, that Catherine was fully a writer—one who used language self-consciously to explore theological ideas, move her readers, and “construct an identity in and through writing.” (p. 44).