Ordering Female Lay Sanctity: Bartholomew of Pisa's De conformitate vitae and the Creation of Female Franciscan Lay Saints

In 1385, Friar Bartholomew of Pisa began De conformitate vitae Beati Francisi ad vitam Domini Jesu, an account of his order’s most celebrated members. Included in Bartholomew’s list are a number of female lay penitents for whom we have no direct evidence of a Franciscan-sponsored cult before the late fourteenth century, including Rose of Viterbo (d. 1251) and Margaret of Cortona (d. 1297).  While Rose was a teenager who began to experience visions after a severe illness, Margaret was a single mother and former concubine who lived as a dedicated penitent for the last twenty years of her life.  This paper will explore the way in which Bartholomew’s list both neutralized and solidified the sometimes contentious and always ambiguous relationship that existed between lay penitents and the mendicants in late medieval Italy, continuing work to rehabilitate both Rose and Margaret’s reputation in the eyes of the Order that was begun in two vitae (or biographies) completed within a few years of each woman’s death.  By creating a set of third-order saints and claiming connections with individuals the Franciscans had ignored in the thirteenth century, this paper will show how Bartholomew’s work contributed to a rewriting of the Franciscans’ relationship with both Margaret and Rose and set the stage for the history of female lay penitents to become subsumed into the history of the Franciscan order.