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Conclusion.html
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Conclusion.html
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<html><head><meta content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="content-type"><style type="text/css">ol{margin:0;padding:0}table td,table th{padding:0}.c0{padding-top:0pt;padding-bottom:0pt;line-height:2.0;orphans:2;widows:2;text-align:left;height:11pt}.c3{padding-top:0pt;padding-bottom:0pt;line-height:2.0;orphans:2;widows:2;text-align:left}.c7{padding-top:0pt;padding-bottom:0pt;line-height:2.0;orphans:2;widows:2;text-align:center}.c1{font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman";font-style:italic;font-weight:400}.c5{color:#000000;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;font-style:normal}.c4{background-color:#ffffff;max-width:468pt;padding:72pt 72pt 72pt 72pt}.c2{font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman";font-weight:400}.c6{font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman";font-weight:700}.c8{margin-left:54pt}.title{padding-top:0pt;color:#000000;font-size:26pt;padding-bottom:3pt;font-family:"Arial";line-height:1.15;page-break-after:avoid;orphans:2;widows:2;text-align:left}.subtitle{padding-top:0pt;color:#666666;font-size:15pt;padding-bottom:16pt;font-family:"Arial";line-height:1.15;page-break-after:avoid;orphans:2;widows:2;text-align:left}li{color:#000000;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Arial"}p{margin:0;color:#000000;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Arial"}h1{padding-top:20pt;color:#000000;font-size:20pt;padding-bottom:6pt;font-family:"Arial";line-height:1.15;page-break-after:avoid;orphans:2;widows:2;text-align:left}h2{padding-top:18pt;color:#000000;font-size:16pt;padding-bottom:6pt;font-family:"Arial";line-height:1.15;page-break-after:avoid;orphans:2;widows:2;text-align:left}h3{padding-top:16pt;color:#434343;font-size:14pt;padding-bottom:4pt;font-family:"Arial";line-height:1.15;page-break-after:avoid;orphans:2;widows:2;text-align:left}h4{padding-top:14pt;color:#666666;font-size:12pt;padding-bottom:4pt;font-family:"Arial";line-height:1.15;page-break-after:avoid;orphans:2;widows:2;text-align:left}h5{padding-top:12pt;color:#666666;font-size:11pt;padding-bottom:4pt;font-family:"Arial";line-height:1.15;page-break-after:avoid;orphans:2;widows:2;text-align:left}h6{padding-top:12pt;color:#666666;font-size:11pt;padding-bottom:4pt;font-family:"Arial";line-height:1.15;page-break-after:avoid;font-style:italic;orphans:2;widows:2;text-align:left}</style></head><body class="c4"><p class="c7"><span class="c5 c6">Conclusion</span></p><p class="c0"><span class="c5 c2"></span></p><p class="c3"><span class="c2 c5"> For a woman who lived for only 33 years, Catherine of Siena proved to be successful in multiple roles — as a writer, mystic, community builder, spiritual advisor, political figure, and ambassador. In many ways, each of these roles served to reinforce each other — Catherine was a mystical writer who wrote to build communities, advise others in spiritual matters, and engage in politics. In addition to putting her full physical body into her work, as she explains in many of her letters, Catherine also put technology to work. She wrote in the emerging Tuscan vernacular in order to have the greatest reach to the people whom she most wanted to or believed most needed to hear her message, and she wrote with a rhetoric that elevated the language to be consistent with Latin letters written by the Pope. She also leveraged the technology of writing to spread her message in her own time through letters across Italy and Europe, and ensured that her writing would serve as a legacy after her death by entrusting her texts to those she knew would be able to further disseminate them. Catherine’s writing and her community served her well as they ensured that her reception would help to canonize her work, through Latin translations that would eventually become translations into other European vernaculars including Middle English.</span></p><p class="c3"><span class="c2"> Catherine’s mysticism proved to be multivalent and extensive, as it embodied her dual-focused approach to spirituality that was both concerned with matters of this world and the afterlife. Like other mystics, Catherine not only tread a careful line that was outside of the economies of sex, gender, and society, but also worked to make her own space. As both a contemplative mystic and a mystic living the </span><span class="c1">vita activa</span><span class="c5 c2">, Catherine was able to both learn from God and teach God’s word to others in the piazzas of Siena and in her letters to followers. Her dual-pronged approach proved to be successful as she was legitimized first as a saint in 1461 and then as a Doctor of the Church in 1970, one of very few women who have received this honor. In 1999, Pope John Paul II named her one of the patron saints of Europe, alongside Benedict of Nursia, Cyril, Methodius, Bridget of Sweden, and Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. With Francis of Assisi, she has also been a patron saint of Italy since 1939. Although her Italian background helped Catherine in terms of her authority within the Church, the way she meticulously constructed herself in her writing, in creating alliances, and occupying herself in political dealings ensured that her legacy would be successful when many women — including Italian women with writing or hagiographies in the vernacular language — would not receive the same legitimacy. </span></p><p class="c3"><span class="c2"> As a mystical writer, Catherine was entering into a literary topos that was already historically rich with mystical figures like Bernard of Clairvaux, the Beguines, and Angela de Foligno. The mystical discourse that conflates divine charitable love with erotic love is picked up also in the secular writing of troubadours, lyric poets, and canonical Italian writers like Dante and Petrarch. This cross-pollination of literary tropes is indicative of the innovative use of language by Catherine and other mystical writers, who are working to describe the ineffable as they encounter the godhead. The same language is used by writers like Guido Cavalcanti, who cannot quite comprehend their beloved. Today, the same tropes are still in use in the lyrics of popular love songs, as Beyoncé describes being both “drunk” and “crazy” in love, just as Catherine also describes both herself and God as they shift subjectivities throughout her </span><span class="c1">Dialogo</span><span class="c5 c2">. Moreover, Catherine’s language itself works in patterns similar to that of her predecessor Dante and her contemporary Petrarch, serving as an illustration of her own innovations within the emerging Italian vernacular.</span></p><p class="c3"><span class="c2"> The success of Catherine’s writing and its legacy is very much embedded within the community she worked to build around herself. As an active force in the world doing acts of charity, offering spiritual guidance, and engaging with the political landscape, Catherine very much cultivated a network around her that she both served and leveraged to help her on her mission. Although Catherine was legitimized in many ways, she also pushed against existing power hierarchies of latinate masculine discourse, notably in her emphatic use of the vernacular Italian and in her public persona. The connections that she made throughout her life proved to keep her within the realm of sanctity and outside of the domain of the transgressive woman. Catherine fostered a community comprised of many people from many walks of life — from religious recluses to the two popes that lived during her lifetime, from poets to lawyers, from her fellow </span><span class="c1">mantellate</span><span class="c5 c2"> to kings and queens. Her ability to interact across these cross-sections of 14th-century urban life shows her tenacity and persuasive capacity, as she managed to be pragmatic and empathetic, while also making demands for what she wanted.</span></p><p class="c3"><span class="c2"> Catherine’s letter writing career is very revealing of her spiritual, literary, interpersonal, and political successes. As F. Thomas Luongo writes (</span><span class="c1">Saintly Politics</span><span class="c5 c2"> 207), </span></p><p class="c3 c8"><span class="c5 c2">Catherine’s epistolary, her use of this relatively flexible genre of writing to mix mysticism in mundane affairs, should be appreciated as an apt expression of her investment in the political scene and of the entire enterprise of her career. Read in the context of the political discourse of the 1370s, Catherine’s letters become part of the process whereby she created a community within which her saintly authority would be recognized, vehicles for her to interject her sanctity and prophetic authority into worldly affairs.</span></p><p class="c3"><span class="c5 c2">Catherine wrote letters that were accessible to those around her, being written in the Italian language that most of her interlocutors — especially those from marginalized communities — would be most comfortable with, and she used earthly language to describe spiritual matters, proving that the divine is approachable to all. Her letters also served her political agenda as she engaged with more and more nobility and high-ranking Church officials throughout her letter-writing endeavors, working to bring those who could wield power to assist her with spiritual missions. The familiar letter, combined with careful and persuasive rhetoric, proved to be an important vehicle in her earthly affairs while also working to secure her legacy and her eventual canonization. </span></p><p class="c3"><span class="c6"> </span><span class="c2">Both</span><span class="c2"> the power of her writing and her network eventually serve Catherine in her reception throughout other vernaculars in Europe, particularly within 15th- and 16th-century England. Catherine was modeled as a teacher and spiritual guide within the very different readership context of the cloistered nuns of Syon Abbey and the lay religious who were connected to them. Though her message was filtered through a Latin translation done by men, that was in turn transposed to Middle English with a framing and editing again done by men that mitigate her words, her texts still reach an audience of primarily female readers, recalling Catherine’s own community of </span><span class="c1">mantellate</span><span class="c5 c2"> and other literate women that she read and wrote with in Siena. The force of Catherine’s words and the care she took to ensure that her texts would persist after her life worked to continue her mission as an active mystic that offered guidance to her readers in a way that could illuminate earthly and spiritual matters in pragmatic and concrete ways that they could understand. </span></p><p class="c3"><span class="c2"> Catherine’s writing and its legacy is a rich field that demands much more inquiry. In addition to literary studies of her Italian works, the texts that treat her (including the hagiographies and Caffarini’s </span><span class="c1">Processo Castellano</span><span class="c2">), the manuscript and printed book traditions, and contemporary readership networks, much more can be said about her historical reception through the Renaissance. Lucrezia Marinella’s </span><span class="c1">Dei gesti eroici e della vita religiosa della serafica Caterina da Siena</span><span class="c2"> (1624), for example, features Catherine as a historical protagonist engaging in writing and community-building within a work of epic poetry, while situating itself in dialogue with Catherine’s own writing. There is also additional work to be done in terms of the English reception of Catherine’s texts, particularly in considering the changing religious landscape as it shifts to Protestantism. John Fenn’s 1609 translation of the </span><span class="c1">Life of Catherine</span><span class="c5 c2"> for English recusants is of particular interest, and can be considered in historical contrast with both Raymond’s original hagiography and Wynken de Worde’s 1492 English edition. A comparative investigation of these texts can bring to light how the cultural climate influences the construction and reception of a literary Italian saint.</span></p><p class="c3"><span class="c5 c2"> Having learned to write through her own community, and being a publicly-engaged woman who addressed her fellow Sienese in speeches in the piazza or through dispatched letters, Catherine was a mystical and literary figure who worked in the earthly realm in order to serve the divine. As both a learner and a teacher, who was tasked with delivering spiritual messages to others, the local language of her time was incredibly instrumental to gain followers and communicate. In an era when most women who challenged the status quo were considered to be witches, Catherine would eventually be made a saint. Building a network around her, Catherine connected disparate and diverse people together: she was a force that drove community engagement through the technology of writing. </span></p><p class="c0"><span class="c5 c2"></span></p><p class="c0"><span class="c5 c2"></span></p></body></html>