The Observance’s women. New models of sanctity and religious discipline for the female dominican movement during the XVth century

Catherine of Siena was considered by the first italian observant dominican friars as the “mother” of their reform. Although the hagiographic figure Raymond of Capua and his collaborators created was intended to be inimitable, Catherine became, after her canonization in 1461, an important model for the female sanctity, giving birth to the phenomenon of the “living saints” (G. Zarri). These women didn’t follow the “old” and “modest” models that were first proposed to the observant nuns and penitents, such as those of Maria of Venice or Chiara Gambacorta, they rather defined themselves as Catharinae imitatrices, even if their behaviour was far from being approved by the authorities of the Dominican order. This discrepancy between two perceptions of the same model (the perception of the dominican friars, and that of the imitatrices) is typical of the gap that always exists between the intentions of the authors and the effective reception and interpretation of their texts; in the context of a reform movement as was the Observance, it reveals also the coexistence of diverging conceptions of the “reform” and of its values. In my paper I will try to analyse the hagiographical texts of the Observant female dominican movement, from the Legenda Major to the necrologies of single communities, comparing what we know about the goals assigned by the hagiographers to their texts with the documents that tells us about the effective reception and interpretation of these models, in search of the the changing and multiple identity of a religious reform movement.