Description:

Retrieving a Living Tradition: Angelina of Montigiove: Francisan Tertiary, Beguine

Roberta McKelvie, OSF

An examination of the story of Angelina and the religious movement associated with her from within the Franciscan tradition, the author reads the source texts with a hermeneutic of suspicion and retrieval. The result provides a greatly expanded and revised perspective on the historical significance of Angelina as a Franciscan tertiary and Italian Beguine.

The Life and Miracles of Margaret of Cortona

by Thomas Renna

Saint Margaret of Cortona is the light of the Third Order of Fracis. Such is the theme of the most extensive biography of any Franciscan Tertiary in the Middle Ages. Margaret’s extraordinary career brings the historian closer to the early development of the Franciscans and the Order of Penance; it tells us much about how women saints were described, and about how civic cults of saints emerged. Another window, although a smaller one, opens to the tensions between the Franciscan Community and the Spiritual Franciscans before the split prior to Pope John XXII. Indeed it could be said that we know more about Margaret of Cortona than about any woman of thirteenth-century Italy, with the exception of Clare of Assisi and Clare of Montefalco.
This edition is translated from the critical Latin edition by Fortunato Iozzelli, O.F.M. of The Life of Saint Margaret of Cortona by Fra Giunta Bevegnati. The original translation by Thomas Renna has been edited by Shannon Larson.

Women of the Streets: Early Franciscan Women and their Mendicant Vocation

Franciscan Heritage Series, Volume 7

Darleen Pryds

Since the role of women within the Franciscan tradition has usually been studied with respect to Clare and her sisters who followed in the footsteps of Francis primarily inside the cloister, a book about mendicant women outside the cloister is unique. But this short study goes further by positioning the texts about these early mendicant women within the history of the Franciscan intellectual tradition, a history usually written with respect to the theological, philosophical and pastoral achievements of men. 

Rose of Viterbo, Angela of Foligno, Margaret of Cortona, and Sancia, Queen of Naples, were all born within the first century of the Franciscan Order. As women who pursued their religious vocation of voluntary poverty, itinerancy, and preaching outside of monastic walls - in the streets and in their homes - they could very well be called the first generation of mendicant women.