Visions of Sainthood in Medieval Rome: The Lives of Margherita Colonna by Giovanni Colonna and Stefania trans. by Larry F. Field (review)

Visions of Sainthood in Medieval Rome offers the first English translation of twin Lives of the Italian noblewoman and putative Franciscan saint, Margherita Colonna (c. 1255–c. 1280). An edition of these Vitae was published by Livario Oliger in 1935 and they have been available in Italian since 2010. Knox and Field also provide an introductory essay that situates Margherita's life and the production of the Vitae in the context of the Colonna's territorial, political, and ecclesiastical ambitions, reminding us how intertwined these were in the thirteenth century.

As a girl, Margherita Colonna rejected the life mapped out for her as the daughter of a wealthy, high-ranking Roman family. She decided instead to dedicate her virginity to Christ and serve the poor. She was initially opposed by her brother Giovanni, a Roman senator, but supported by her brother Giacomo, a Franciscan friar, later a cardinal. Eventually permitted to pursue her vocation, she formed a quasi-religious female community at Monte Prenestino outside Rome. After her death, Margherita's community was accepted as a house of the Sorores minores inclusae, a Franciscan order. In 1285, the Sisters were settled under Giacomo's protection in San Silvestro in Capite, a former Benedictine monastery, in a part of Rome under Colonna patronage, and Margherita's remains were translated there.

These Vitae were written under Colonna family auspices in an effort to establish Margherita's sanctity and build a cult around her memory after her death. Vita I is anonymous, but Oliger established that it was written c. 1281–1285 by Giovanni, probably with input from Giacomo, whose spiritual experiences also inform the text. Vita II was written c. 1288–1292 by a woman called Stefania, apparently at Giacomo's request. Stefania was a member of Margherita's community, and may have led it after Margherita's death. Her account supplements Giovanni's with additional miracles and offers a first-hand account of Margherita's final years.

This work will interest scholars of late medieval religion, lay sanctity, and gender. It adds to Lezlie Knox's work on the identities and forms of religious life developed by St Francis's female followers, and it contributes another work to the small but growing corpus of lives of holy women by other women that Sean Field has already published on. In its presentation of two Lives of the same subject, one male-authored and one female-authored, it offers further material for analysis of the role of gender in the production of female hagiography.