Epilogue

In the ‘Introduction’ to this volume, to explicate my methodology I used an example of a contemporary stigmatic, Toaipuapuagā Opapo Soana’i. Her wounds have elicited conflicted responses that include belief, disbelief, and accusations of fraud. In academic circles Toaipuapuagā’s wounds have invited reflection on what the stigmata mean to her immediate community in relation to the social, political, and religious challenges that they face....

Receivers and Deceivers

Chapter 5 considers the religious trajectories of female stigmatics in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Some holy women met with opposition but nonetheless succeeded in their religious lives, while others who claimed stigmatic status had their reputations destroyed. Theologians like Johannes Nider (d. 1438) doubted and criticized the idea of women as bearers of Christ’s wounds. Despite the hostile positions put forward by Nider and other-like minded theologians, renowned female stigmatics such as Magdalena Beutler (d. 1458) and Osanna of Mantua (d. 1505) navigated their religious careers effectively through precarious waters. However, stigmatics like Chiara Bugni (d. 1514) and Lucia Brocadelli (d. 1544) were not able to maintain their influential positions as bearers of Christ’s wounds.

Stigmata in an Age of Religious Change

Chapter 6 turns to the competing views of holiness and religion held by Reforming theologians including Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Theodore Beza, as well as Catholic thinkers like John Fisher, Laurentius Surius, and Louis of Granada. It assesses the shifting sands of the sixteenth century when well-established holy women like Magdalena de la Cruz (d. 1560) were imprisoned as sham stigmatics. It demonstrates that some Catholic and Protestants diverged and at times converged in commenting on Galatians 6:17, revealing a range of responses toward stigmatization, some less predictable than others. Far from disappearing from religious discourse, in the sixteenth century assessments of stigmatics and stigmatization took on renewed energy.

The Mark of a Saintly Woman

Chapter 3 analyses how stigmatization became predominantly linked to women and female spirituality. It considers the strong theological defence that evolved in the second half of the thirteenth century that asserted holy, virginal women were axiomatic stigmatics. It also inspects the religious lives of stigmatics that often consisted of routinized prayer, illness, and suffering. The nature of invisible stigmata is investigated; it is demonstrated that there is a connection between the development of invisible stigmatization and the increase in female stigmatics during the thirteenth century. As living icons of Christ, these women brought to mind the divine passion and inspired hope in human redemption. Illness and holiness blended into a powerful cocktail of salvation as represented in the stigmatic body. But it was not only their likeness to Christ, but also their likeness to Mary that was remarkable. As virgins, their flesh was sympathetic and open to wounding making them ideal bearers of stigmata.

Bearing the Stigmata

Chapter 1 traces the patristic and early medieval exegesis of Galatians 6:17. It assesses how language and imagery were appropriated and developed by eleventh- and twelfth-century monastic theologians (especially Peter Damian) into a soteriological system of penance and redemption that focused on Christ’s wounds. Significantly, it looks at examples of stigmatization before Francis of Assisi. These cases vary in their form; they gradually move from stigmata being almost exclusively associated with the sacerdotal order in the early Middle Ages to being linked to the laity by the early thirteenth century as with the cases of Peter the Conversus and Mary of Oignies.

Francis of Assisi

Chapter 2 looks at the stigmatization of Francis of Assisi in the thirteenth century and how his reception of the stigmata was mainly understood as a miraculous event. The chapter also traces how the miracle met with acceptance and resistance during the following centuries. Some theologians argued that the cause of the wounds was strictly divine, while others emphasized that Francis’s love for Christ initiated the stigmata. The power and function of prayer, however, featured in most explanations that sought to understand the nature of Francis’s wounds. A series of papal bulls promulgated by a number of thirteenth-century popes, which secured widespread support for the Franciscan claim of stigmatic supremacy, are also considered in this chapter.

Introduction

Medieval and early modern theologians grappled with the implications of bearing the stigmata since the reports of Francis of Assisi’s five miraculous wounds spread across Western Europe in the thirteenth century. It was only during the second half of the seventeenth century, however, that a systematic historical and theological study of stigmata arose. This historiography, which started in the midst of religious reassessment in the aftermath of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, reveals trends that have come to shape stigmatology, that is, the study of religious stigmata in a Christian context. The Introduction considers, therefore, the authors and their theories that came to define the meaning of stigmata and stigmatics.

Catherine of Siena

Chapter 4 examines theories of stigmatology that emerged during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The works of the Franciscan Bartolomeo of Pisa (d. 1401) and the Dominican Tommaso Caffarini (d. 1434) established categories of stigmatization that provide insight into the devotional, theological, philosophical, and cultural implications of the phenomenon and the place it held in late medieval religious life. In several theological and devotional circles stigmatization could be a diverse experience, far from being a unique miracle related to Francis of Assisi alone. Catherine of Siena emerges as the most charismatic stigmatic of the fourteenth century, whose invisible wounds became the insignia for Dominican reform and female authority. The fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries were crucial moments in the history of stigmatology when a diversity of stigmatic realities was robustly defended and promoted.