A Companion to Catherine of Siena ed. by Carolyn Muessig, George Ferzoco, Beverly Mayne Kienzle, and: Catherine of Siena: The Creation of a Cult ed. by Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Gabriela Signori (review)

Approaching Catherine of Siena (1347–1380) is never easy. Her popularity and effectiveness as author and saint—and the rapid growth of her cult, extensively promoted by both Dominicans and Carthusians—means that her works, works about her, and the dissemination of translations of both across late medieval and early modern Europe present themselves to the researcher today as an immensely complicated textual network of hundreds of Latin and vernacular manuscripts and prints, many still only to be read in archives. Before Jörg Jungmayr’s edition based on a transcription of Nuremberg, Stadtbibliothek MS Cent. IV, 75 (in 2004), most studies of the Legenda maior, Raymond of Capua’s hagiography of the Sienese holy woman, cited the 1675 Acta Santorum edition (a critical edition by Silvia Nocentini has just been published by Edizioni del Galluzzo, Florence). The descriptive bibliography of Catherinian studies from 1901 to 2010 is now in six volumes (totaling 1,600 pages). The authors of A Companion consulted 145 manuscripts in the course of their study. As Bernard McGinn remarks in The Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism, 1350–1550 (2012), “In comparison with most medieval mystics, what we have on Catherine is an embarrassment of riches” (199).

The thirteen essays in A Companion and the thirteen in The Creation of a Cult complement each other marvelously in bringing the anglophone reader into the world of Catherine of Siena and Catherinian studies. Taken together, they provide a comprehensive, up-to-date introduction to the state of the field (A Companion) and an excellent investigation of the reception of Catherine across Europe (The Creation of a Cult). Across both volumes, one is struck by the volume of work already done on Catherine (particularly in the past decade or so), the considerable strength of the field as it currently stands—and the amount of work yet to do.

A Companion to Catherine of Siena offers a thorough, masterly account of Catherine’s life, works, and historical context, as well as her posthumous reception; the editors have excelled at gathering together a perceptive, cogent group of essays. After an introduction by the editors, F. Thomas Luongo opens the volume with “The Historical Reception of Catherine of Siena.” He outlines the development of Catherine’s cult from its origins at the end of the fourteenth century, through early prints and philological endeavors (the Vocabolario Cateriniano of Girolamo Gigli [1660–1722]), to the path that the saint took through the tumultuous twentieth century. Allison Clark Thurber next puts Catherine in the context of local Tuscan eremitism in “Female Reclusion in Siena at the Time of Catherine of Siena,” demonstrating the important role that female hermits played in the spiritual life of Trecento Siena. The third chapter, Blake Beattie’s “Catherine of Siena and the Papacy,” describes Catherine’s most prominent work of political activism—her visit to Avignon and her correspondence with Church officials in the struggle to return the papacy to Rome.

While Catherine’s mystical vocabulary is often noted for being especially blood-saturated, Heather Webb’s “Lacrime Cordiali: Catherine of Siena on the Value of Tears” draws our attention to another key affective fluid in her works. “Tears can block speech and by their silent presence communicate more powerfully than words can. But tears can also bind themselves up with speech, thus authenticating words” (101), she writes, persuasively drawing out the literary-theological roots and rhetorical uses of Catherine’s “typology of tears” (112). The fifth chapter, Maiju Lehmijoki-Gardner’s “Denial as Action—Penance and Its Place in the Life of Catherine of Siena,” explores penitential practices and Catherine’s famous asceticism in relation to the “gendered expectations” (118) of...