Product Description

Saint Catherine of Siena (1347–1380) has become a defining figure in the history of medieval religion and one of the main exemplars of the "feminine turn" in late medieval religious culture. Despite a hagiographical tradition and historiography that has placed Catherine at a mystic remove from the politics of her day, Catherine’s public authority was shaped by politics, both locally in Siena and broadly within late-fourteenth-century contests between the Papacy and the Republic of Florence for hegemony in central Italy.

In The Saintly Politics of Catherine of Siena, F. Thomas Luongo combines literary-critical readings of Catherine's letters—she was the author of one of the largest collections of medieval letters—with political and social analysis, thus situating the saint firmly within her time and place. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources, Luongo investigates how Catherine’s spiritual authority and sanctity were linked with contemporary political and cultural developments. He shows how the political situation of the Church in Italy and a culture that privileged female spirituality and prophetic speech facilitated Catherine’s emergence into a public role.

The Catherine that emerges from Luongo’s well-written pages is a splendid example of what can result when a historian asks fresh questions about a familiar figure’s life and brings new materials and methods to bear in formulating answers. The Saintly Politics of Catherine of Siena offers a more complex, more interesting, woman than the figure portrayed in most contemporary scholarship.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #419958 in Books
• Published on: 2006-01-19
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 250 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Many have revered Catherine of Siena (1347–1380) as a paragon of mystical feminine piety, an ethereal saint whose timeless spiritual sensitivities have inspired Christians for more than 600 years. Scholars as well as devotees have tended to remove Catherine from her immediate medieval context as an influential Sienese noblewoman. Tulane history professor Luongo brings the medieval saint firmly back to earth in this published dissertation, which examines Catherine's letters through a sociopolitical lens. She was, he asserts, actively involved in the issues of the day in a particularly turbulent time in Italian history, marked by the Black Death, social revolutions and papal instability. Luongo teases out possible political entendres in Catherine's correspondence by juxtaposing her words and known movements against contemporary political and social events. The result is a specialized scholarly revisionism that, while not easily accessed by the general reader, will be appreciated by its intended academic audience. (Jan.)
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From the Inside Flap
"This is a brilliant and important book. It undertakes, in a highly convincing fashion, a radical reinterpretation of the career of one of the most important figures in medieval religious history. F. Thomas Luongo’s rereading of Catherine’s letters in the context of local and papal politics is highly compelling and he deftly explains why—through the hagiographical writings of her biographers and through modern interpretive agendas—Catherine has been consistently extracted from this political context. There is no comparable book: the research here is groundbreaking."—Maureen Miller, University of California, Berkeley, author of The Bishop’s Palace

About the Author
F. Thomas Luongo is Assistant Professor of History at Tulane University.