The purpose of this research is to examine the life and work of St. Catherine of Siena (1347-1380), a Dominican nun. The plan of the research will be to set forth a summary of her early life and then to discuss her decision to become a member of a religious order, with particular emphasis on her accomplishments as a nun, including her role as an institutional advocate in decisions taken by the hierarchy in the context of the crisis of schism in the Roman Catholic Church.
Catherine Benincasa was the youngest of 25 children, a twin and one of 13 siblings to survive to adulthood. Though born into a respected and worldly guild family, Catherine appears to have had tendencies toward mysticism and extreme forms of self-denial from an early age. At the age of six, while looking across a valley at a church, she experienced the first of many spiritual visions, this one of Jesus and of Sts. Peter, Paul, and John the Evangelist. After this vision she appears to have developed a scrupulous conscience and given herself over to meditation and varieties of deliberate and extreme self-mortification ranging from fasting to scourging as a strategy of atonement for sins. She took a private vow of chastity, imploring her family's consent to be a nun instead of marry, going so far as to cut off her hair to make herself less marriageable. Only when smallpox or a similar serious disease disfigured her--it is not clear whether the disfigurement was permanent--did her family consent.
The third order of St. Dominic received Catherine as a Sister of Penitence, when she was nineteen years old. It was unusual for a young, unmarried woman to be admitted as a so-called tertiary; most tertiaries, i.e., laymen and laywomen who lived the monastic life but not officially as members of a religious order, appear to have been middle-aged couples or widows and widowers. For three years, Catherine lived in con templative solitude as a so-called mantellata, cloiste...