l’s Reviews > Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection > Status Update

For him, as for Guglielmo, it was precisely the fact
that women communicated their knowledge only to their close
associates, orally and in the vernacular, that made it secret; the
same information committed to Latin script, which was in fact
comprehensible only to a minuscule, overwhelmingly male fraction of the inhabitants of Europe, acquired, paradoxically, a public and "manifest" character.

In late medieval Italy, nakedness was used as a symbol of humility and poverty as much as of sexual availability. Thus Margherita's lack of clothing, like her outspread arms, assimilated her more directly to the naked male body of Christ on the cross or the penitent Mary Magdalene than to, say, Eve.

"the cross was like a little human body [ corpusculum human um],
though not completely well formed, since that little body appeared
to have a little head made of flesh, of about the size of a small bean. "

unhinged energies

The birth of Christ in the soul had been a common trope in Christian writing since late Antiquity, often expressed in arrestingly concrete form. Writing in the fourth century, for example, Ambrose of Milan referred to Jesus as "the boy who is birthed by the one who accepts the spirit of salvation in the uterus of his mind and described the failure of this process in terms of miscarriage.

Dislike.

(Although unconvinced by
his findings, he changed his mind on the way home after encountering a furious storm, which he interpreted as the saint's justified
retribution for his lack of faith.)

This feminization of the penitential ideal in the late 13th century posed a challenge for ecclesiastical authorities, who had doubts about the wisdom and appropriateness of large numbers of laywomen leaving their families to live autonomous and sometimes highly visible penitential lives. These doubts were magnified by the strong visionary and ecstatic element in this movement

The thirteenth-century Italian founders and early leaders of the
mendicant orders had called for a new spiritual ideal, organized
around a life of penance, poverty, and urban religious activism,
in place of the traditional model of monastic enclosure. To their
surprise - and to the puzzlement of later ecclesiastical leaders -
this ideal took deepest root not among men, as they had clearly
expected, but among laywomen

Before a host of witnesses, including local clerics and municipal
officials and citizens, they swore that Chiara had rebuked a nun
who had tried to make the sign of the cross over her on her deathbed, saying, "'This is unnecessary, since I have the cross of our
lord Jesus Christ fixed in my heart.'

lollll

And he said to her: "I am looking for a sturdy spot on which to set the cross, and I find here a suitable place on which to set it:' Then he added: "If you want to be my daughter, you must die on the cross."

goth living

In the course of her testimony, Sister Francesca gave two separate reasons for opening Chiara's body: the nuns wanted to preserve her corpse by embalming it, because God "delighted" in it;
and because they "believed they would find something wonderful" inside her heart