Saint Margaret of Cortona - The New Mary Magdalene — Franciscan Tertiary, Penitent of Cortona, Mirror of Sinners (1247–1297)
Feast Day: February 22 Canonized: May 16, 1728 — Pope Benedict XIII Beatified: Cultus confirmed from the time of her death; formally recognized before her canonization Order: Third Order of Saint Francis (Franciscan Tertiary) Patron of: Sinners · Single mothers · The falsely accused · The homeless · Those with mental illness · Penitent women · Stepchildren · Orphans · Midwives · Reformed sinners · The Franciscan Third Order
"She who fell to the ground a sinner arose a penitent." — Fra Giunta Bevegnati, Legenda de vita et miraculis beatae Margaritae de Cortona (c. 1308)
There is a particular kind of saint the Church loves but finds difficult to categorize — not the virgin martyr, not the theologian bishop, not the angelic child who never knew serious sin. The other kind. The one who spent a significant stretch of her life going in entirely the wrong direction, who made choices she would carry as grief for the rest of her days, and who was transformed not despite that history but through it.
Saint Margaret of Cortona is that saint.
We know more about her interior life than about almost any other woman of thirteenth-century Italy. That is because her confessor, Fra Giunta Bevegnati, wrote the most extensive biography of any Franciscan Tertiary in the Middle Ages — the Legenda de vita et miraculis beatae Margaritae de Cortona, completed around 1308, eleven years after her death. It is a work that brings the historian closer to the early development of the Franciscans and the Order of Penance than almost any other surviving document — and it tells us more about Margaret of Cortona than about any other woman of thirteenth-century Italy, with the sole exception of Clare of Assisi and Clare of Montefalco.
What that document reveals is a woman of astonishing range: mystic and administrator, public penitent and political diplomat, nursing sister and prophetic voice. A woman who spent her final nine years in contemplative enclosure on a Tuscan hillside after spending her first nine years in Cortona building a hospital, founding a nursing congregation, establishing a confraternity, and publicly confronting a bishop who was living more like a warlord than a pastor.
She is the New Mary Magdalene. She earned the title. This is how.
The World She Was Born Into
Margaret was born in 1247 in Laviano, a small village nestled in the rolling hills of the Valdichiana, midway between Montepulciano and Cortona, in the diocese of Chiusi.
She arrived into one of the most turbulent centuries in European history. These were the days of Manfred and Conradin, of the Guelphs and Ghibellines tearing Italy in two, when passions of every kind ran high and men lived at great extremes — times of great sinners, but also of great saints. It was the age of Thomas Aquinas in Paris, of Dante in Florence, of Cimabue and Giotto. In Tuscany, city-states made constant war on each other. The Guelph-Ghibelline conflict — the great medieval divide between those who supported the Pope and those who supported the Holy Roman Emperor — ran like a fault line through every family, every city, every generation. It would eventually shape the manner of her lover's death and place her at the center of civic peacemaking she never asked for.
Her father was a small farmer. Her mother was the organizing warmth of her world. Before Margaret could read, her mother taught her to say the names of Jesus and Mary, to love Christ crucified, to pray with the simple directness of Tuscan peasant faith.
When Margaret was seven years old, her mother died.
The loss was not merely emotional. It was structural. The household that had held her — the warmth, the formation, the sense of being loved specifically and consistently — was gone. Two years later, her father remarried. Between Margaret and her new stepmother, there was but little sympathy or affection. Margaret was, by nature, emotionally vivid — what her sources call di spirito allegro, gay of spirit, high-spirited — and she was living in a home that offered her coldness where she needed warmth.
She grew. She became beautiful. And the combination of beauty, emotional hunger, fatherless formation, and a cold household set the stage for what came next.
The Knight of Montepulciano: Nine Years and a Promise Never Kept
Around the year 1264, when Margaret was approximately seventeen, a young nobleman from Montepulciano came into her life.
His name, preserved in her Legenda, was Arsenio — though some local traditions call him Raniero di Pecora, connected to the powerful del Pecora family whose hunting lodge in the hills along the Tuscan-Umbrian border was where much of their time together was spent. He was wealthy. He had a castle. He had the certainty of a man who had grown up with every advantage.
He wanted Margaret.
She went with him. She would say in her confessions that she went "unwillingly" — under pressure, not by pure free choice. The tradition preserves this without sentimentalizing it. She was not claiming innocence. She was placing her choice within a context: a seventeen-year-old girl from a cold household, without a mother's guidance or a father's protection, choosing the path of least resistance toward the affection she had been starved of for a decade. In her later confessions she expresses this with characteristic directness — she never minimized her sin, but she also never pretended she had acted with the full freedom of a woman properly formed and properly loved.
She moved into his castle near Montepulciano. She bore him a son, named Jacopo. She asked him to marry her. He promised he would. The promise was renewed multiple times across nine years and was never kept.
The Legenda records that she begged him repeatedly for the dignity of a real marriage. He was always about to. There was always a reason why not yet. Nine years of not yet.
She wore his jewels. She lived in his castle. She had the social position of a nobleman's household — minus the one thing that would have made that position hers by right rather than by his continuing tolerance. The fact that she returned all his jewels and property to his family when it was over tells you everything about how much he had given and how completely she understood it had never really been hers.
She was, by every account that survives, beautiful, generous, and deeply unhappy in a way she could not yet fully name. And somewhere beneath the castle's comfort and the years of misdirected desire, the seeds her mother had planted before she died were still alive, still waiting for the conditions that would finally allow them to break through.
The Dog, the Oak Forest, and the Day Everything Ended
In 1273, Arsenio went out hunting in the oak forest on the border of Tuscany and Umbria. He did not come home.
His favorite hunting dog returned to the castle that evening — alone, frantic, pulling at Margaret's dress, refusing to be still. She followed it into the forest. It led her deep into the oaks, to a place called i Giorgi, where she found what remained of the life she had organized her entire adult existence around.
He had been murdered — caught up in the perpetual violence of the Guelph-Ghibelline feuds, his death a message sent to the del Pecora family from their enemies. His body had been dragged into the trees and hastily covered with branches to conceal it. The place where she fell to her knees in that grove of oaks became a site of pilgrimage immediately after her death; in 1750, a votive chapel was built there. The faithful called the ancient oak beneath which she prayed "the Oak of Repentance." It stood for centuries. In recent years it finally fell, and its preserved trunk now stands before the chapel — which itself still receives pilgrims every September.
She repented all her sins to God in that forest before she walked back to the castle. Then she gathered herself, returned his jewels and property to his family, packed nothing that was not hers, and left.
She went to her father's house at Laviano with her son and the nine years she was carrying.
Her father would have taken her in. His wife refused. Margaret threw herself at his feet and begged for forgiveness. The stepmother held firm. The door stayed closed.
The Road to Cortona: Twenty Kilometers and One Direction
Rejected at the one place she thought she could still go, Margaret faced the most obvious available option: she was still beautiful, and the world was already clear about what it would trade for that beauty. For a moment she felt the pull of it.
She prayed instead. In the prayer came a direction — an inner sense, strong enough to act on, pointing her toward the Franciscan friars at Cortona, twenty kilometers away.
She walked there with Jacopo.
On her arrival in the city around 1272, two noblewomen — named in her sources as Marinana (or Maineria) and Raneria de Moscari — noticed her loneliness and took her in. The Moscari palazzo would be her first home in Cortona, and the two sisters would arrange for Jacopo's education in Arezzo so that Margaret could begin the work of rebuilding her life. Their charity was practical and specific — not a donation at arm's length but shelter, introductions, childcare logistics. They introduced her to the Franciscan friars at the church of San Francesco.
Fra Giunta Bevegnati became her confessor. Fra Giovanni da Castiglione also served as a spiritual director in the early years. Together they gave her the framework that the rest of her life would be built within.
Margaret's arrival in Cortona must have been the talk of the town. She had a past that everyone would eventually know. She was young, beautiful, unmarried, with a child, and she was asking for the Franciscan habit of a penitent. This was not a private story quietly lived. It was a public conversion in a city that was watching.
Three Years of Battle: What Conversion Actually Looks Like
Margaret was not the kind of person who converts gently. She was never going to drift quietly into holiness.
For three years she struggled with temptation — with the pull of the world she had come from, the memory of what pleasure and beauty and male attention felt like, the gravity of the life she was trying to leave. She was, by nature, gay of spirit and strongly drawn to the world. Temptation, far from weakening her resolve, pushed her toward greater discipline — but also toward extremes.
She undertook severe fasting. She deprived herself of meat entirely, subsisting on bread and herbs. She wore a rough penitential garment. She attempted to mutilate her own face with a razor — to destroy the beauty she blamed for Arsenio's attraction, for nine years of sin, for everything. Fra Giunta physically stopped her.
The confessor's intervention was not an obstacle to her penitence. It was its wisdom. What Margaret was reaching for in that moment was not true mortification but grief and self-loathing wearing mortification's costume. Genuine penance orders the body toward God. Destruction disguised as penance goes somewhere else entirely. Fra Giunta recognized the difference and pulled her back.
She also, one Sunday, returned to Laviano — her home village, where everyone knew her — with a cord around her neck. She stood at Mass in the church where she had been baptized and asked the entire parish's forgiveness for the scandal of her past life. That required a different kind of courage than private flagellation — the courage to stand visible in the place where you were formed and say, in public, to the people who knew you: I know what I did. I am sorry.
The sources preserve one complication that most biographies pass over: some of this mortification was unjustly extended to her son. Jacopo suffered from the austerity she imposed on their shared household during these years — not from cruelty but from a mother whose self-punishing asceticism did not always account for what her child needed. It is one of the honest complications in her story, preserved in the record without softening. She was not a perfect penitent. She was a human one.
By the end of the three years of probation, the Franciscan community was convinced of her sincerity. She was admitted to the Third Order of Saint Francis — the branch of Franciscan life for laypeople — in 1277. She received the grey-brown habit, the cord, and the name that publicly declared her new identity. She was now a poverella — a little poor one — in the most concrete possible sense: she had given up everything that remained of her former life and was begging her bread on the streets of Cortona.
The Question That Changed Everything
It was 1277, the same year she received the habit. She was praying in the church of the Franciscan friars when she heard — or understood herself to hear — a voice ask her something direct:
"What is your wish, poverella?"
Poverella. Little poor one. The diminutive that Francis of Assisi had used for Clare of Assisi. Now it came to the farmer's daughter from Laviano who had once worn a nobleman's jewels and was now begging her bread from the streets of the same city that had once watched her arrive with her illegitimate child and nothing else.
She answered: "I neither seek nor wish for aught but Thee, my Lord Jesus."
It was thirty years of desire aimed at the wrong things, finally named correctly in a single sentence.
The love she had been chasing since her mother died — the love she had tried to find in a castle, in a man's promises, in jewels she eventually had to hand back — had been pointing toward something real all along. It just had the wrong name attached to it. Now, at thirty years old, in a grey Franciscan habit, begging her bread and nursing the sick, she finally said its name correctly.
From this moment, her Legenda records a sustained mystical communion with Christ that would deepen and intensify across the remaining twenty years of her life. The divine address in prayer evolved with her growth. Christ first called her poverella — the name of the arriving penitent, humble and external. After a period of further purification, he called her figlia mia — my daughter — the name of someone who has been received, who belongs, who is home. The distance between those two words is the entire interior story of her conversion.
From Penitent to Apostle: The Authority of a Witness Who Has Been There
What happened next surprised everyone — possibly including Margaret.
She did not retreat into private holiness. She went public.
She preached against vice in the streets of Cortona. She called sinners back to the sacraments. She spoke to people who had long since given up on God with an authority that no person with an uncomplicated history could have managed. She had been where they were. They knew it. That was the credential no education or ordination could supply.
The Legenda records the divine words that framed her vocation: "I have made you a mirror for sinners. From you will the most hardened learn how willingly I am merciful to them, in order to save them. You are a ladder for sinners, that they may come to me through your example. My daughter, I have set you as a light in the darkness, as a new star that I give to the world, to bring light to the blind, to guide back again those who have lost the way, and to raise up those who are broken down under their sins."
A mirror. A ladder. A new star. Not a model of perfection admired from a safe distance — something more practically useful than that. Something the broken sinner can look into and see their own face. Something to put a foot on and begin to climb.
The Church's comparison of Margaret to Mary Magdalene was not mere rhetoric. Magdalene was the first witness to the Resurrection because she had the most to be grateful for. Margaret called sinners home to God because she had been one in a way everyone in Cortona could see, and they could not dispute what they had witnessed happen to her.
She began to earn her bread by caring for children and nursing sick ladies in their homes — practical, unglamorous work for which her hospital experience at the castle may have partly prepared her. As her sanctity became known, people began seeking her counsel. The city's poor became her primary community. The Legenda records that she was "not content till the half of what was given her in charity was shared with others who seemed to her more needy." She gave away more than she kept. And out of that practice grew everything that followed.
The Hospital, the Poverelle, and the Confraternity: A Saint Who Built Things
One of the most remarkable features of Margaret's story — often overlooked in accounts that focus exclusively on her mysticism and penitence — is that she was a gifted institutional founder with a practical, organizing mind.
Around 1278, using funds gathered from the noble families of Cortona whom she had infected with her charitable vision, she opened the first hospital for the poor of Cortona — a permanent facility for the sick, homeless, and destitute who had no other provision.
To staff it, she organized a congregation of Tertiary Sisters called le Poverelle — the Little Poor Ones — women who committed themselves to nursing work, care for prisoners, and institutional management of the hospital. She wrote statutes for this congregation influenced by the Franciscan rule and gave it, above all, the testimony of her own life as its organizing principle.
She then established the Confraternity of Our Lady of Mercy, which bound together Cortona's prosperous citizens in organized financial support of the hospital and its charitable works. The wealthy were given a structured way to serve the poor; the poor were given a permanent institution in which to receive care. The two were bound together under the patronage of the Mother of God.
In 1286, the civil government of Cortona gave her a formal charter making this work legally permanent. The secular authorities were not doing the Church a favor. They were acknowledging that Margaret of Cortona — the woman who had arrived fourteen years earlier with a child, no resources, and a past everyone knew — was doing something for their most vulnerable citizens that no other person or institution was doing as effectively.
She had also, by this point, acquired the respect of Cortona's citizens across class lines in a way that was unusual for any private individual, let alone a woman of her background. When disputes needed mediating — when the bitter feuds of the Guelph-Ghibelline conflict split local families — people came to her cell for her intervention. She was asked to seek reconciliation between warring Cortonese families. She was asked to negotiate between the people of Cortona and their bishop.
The Bishop She Rebuked (Twice, by Divine Command)
The most striking political episode of Margaret's public life was her confrontation with Guglielmo degli Ubertini Pazzi, the Bishop of Arezzo — in whose diocese Cortona lay.
Ubertini was a bishop of the old model: he conducted himself more like a secular prince and warrior than a pastor of souls. He led military campaigns. He commanded soldiers. He plundered territories. He was, in the language of the era, a prelate who had entirely confused the episcopal office with feudal lordship.
Twice — by what the Legenda describes as divine command — Margaret publicly rebuked him, charging that he lived more like a secular prince and soldier than a pastor of souls. This was not a quiet private word to a confessor. This was a woman from Cortona, a Franciscan tertiary with no institutional authority, publicly calling a bishop to account for the conduct of his office.
He did not listen. In 1289, Ubertini was killed in battle at Bibbiena — the end that his manner of living had made inevitable, and that Margaret's Legenda records as the fulfillment of the prophetic warning she had delivered.
The episode places Margaret in a lineage that includes Peter Damian, Catherine of Siena, and Hildegard of Bingen — women and men who understood that the prophetic charism carried the obligation of speaking truth to ecclesiastical power, regardless of institutional rank or personal safety. She had no authority over the bishop. She spoke anyway, because she understood herself to be carrying a word she had not generated and could not keep silent.
The Accusations She Bore Without Bitterness
No story of Margaret's life would be complete without naming what the community tried to do to her reputation at the height of her sanctity.
Some in Cortona spread the accusation that her relationship with Fra Giunta was improper — that the confessor and his penitent were involved in something more than spiritual direction.
The accusation was false. Entirely, verifiably false. The subsequent investigation of her life confirmed that the boundaries of the relationship had been maintained with complete integrity throughout. Every subsequent examination of the Legenda and the canonization proceedings confirms this.
But the accusation was also entirely predictable. A beautiful woman with a known past spending sustained intimate time with a male confessor — the social logic of suspicion is as old as the suspicion of beautiful penitent women, and it requires no evidence to operate.
Margaret did not mount a public campaign to clear her name. She bore the accusation with a patience that her Legenda records as characteristic — rooted not in resignation but in the same contemplative detachment that characterized her prayer. She could not undo what people were saying. She continued her work.
The Church eventually assigned her the patronage of the falsely accused. She earned it personally, in Cortona, by surviving this specific injury without bitterness and without abandoning the work.
The Mystical Life: Ecstasy, the Passion, and the Gothic Crucifix
Across the 1270s and 1280s, Margaret's interior prayer deepened into a sustained mystical communion that the Legenda documents at considerable length. Scholars have noted that her mystical experiences were closely tied to the Gothic Passion Crucifix iconography that was spiritually dominant in her era — the graphic depiction of the suffering Christ that provoked intense emotional and spiritual responses in thirteenth-century mystics across Italy and Germany.
Margaret's contemplation was organized entirely around the Passion. She meditated on the details of Christ's suffering with the absorbed attention that her confessor described as "ecstatic." She received divine communications that she then delivered to others — to sinners, to clergy, to civic leaders. She experienced visions, including, near the end of her life, a vision of Saint Francis of Assisi that her confessor recorded as one of the most significant of her mystical experiences.
The Legenda also notes her "extraordinary love for the mysteries of the Eucharist." She received Communion frequently — unusually often by the standards of her era — and her hours of prayer before the Blessed Sacrament were described by those who observed her as entirely absorbed. When she prayed, she was genuinely elsewhere.
What is distinctive about Margaret's mysticism, compared to many of her contemporaries, is that it never separated from action. She was not a mystic who withdrew from the world to pray. She was a mystic whose prayer fueled her service to the world with an energy that observers found inexhaustible. She is a wonderful instance not only of the mystic combined with the soul of action, but of the soul made active precisely because it was a mystic — action drawn from contemplative depth rather than running alongside it.
She was, in this, the direct predecessor of Catherine of Siena — two Tuscan women, a generation apart, who combined the highest contemplative prayer with the most engaged public apostolate, and who both understood the combination not as paradox but as necessity.
The Oratory Above the City: The Last Nine Years
In 1288, the Church gave Margaret the use of the ruins of a small oratory above Cortona — the chapel of Saints Basil, Giles, and Catherine of Alexandria, damaged during the 1258 siege of the town by Arezzo. She moved there and spent the remaining nine years of her life in contemplative enclosure, receiving visitors and her confessor, but essentially alone before God on the hilltop.
She was not retreating from defeat. She was arriving at the life her entire previous formation had been preparing her for — the closest possible sustained encounter with the Christ she had been contemplating since the church of San Francesco in 1277. The service and the contemplation had always been, for her, the same vocation in different registers. Now she lived its deepest expression.
Even in enclosure, her practical intelligence did not fall silent. She personally oversaw the restoration of the damaged chapel and the adjacent convent, which had become too small to house all the Poverelle her congregation had grown to include.
Her son Jacopo — the child she had carried out of Montepulciano with nothing else, educated at Arezzo by the Franciscan friars, raised by a mother whose penitential intensity was not always easy to live beside — had by this time become a Franciscan friar himself. The grace she had received did not stay with her alone. It moved, as grace characteristically does, into the next generation.
The Death She Was Told Was Coming
She was divinely warned of the day and hour of her death.
The foreknowledge was not cause for anxiety. It was cause for preparation — and the preparation was simply a continuation of what the last nine years in the oratory had been: prayer, contemplation, surrender.
On February 22, 1297, Saint Margaret of Cortona died in the small room behind the chapel of Saint Basil, above the city that had received her twenty-five years earlier with nothing. She was not yet fifty years old. She had spent twenty-nine years in Cortona performing acts of penance.
The city did not wait for Rome's canonical process.
By 1330 — just thirty-three years after her death — the citizens of Cortona, working from a design by Giovanni Pisano, had constructed a magnificent basilica in her honor: Santa Margherita. The old chapel of Saint Basil was subsumed into its nave. The spot where Margaret had died — the small room behind the chapel — was preserved within the larger structure. In 1456, her body was exhumed and found to be incorrupt. It was placed in a silver casket above the high altar, where it remains to this day.
She had been venerated as a saint from the moment of her death. The formal canonical process confirmed what Cortona had been declaring in prayer and stone for four centuries.
Pope Benedict XIII canonized her on May 16, 1728 — 431 years after she died in the oratory above the city.
The Primary Sources: What We Know and How We Know It
Everything we know about Margaret's interior life comes primarily from two sources, and honest engagement with her story requires knowing what they are.
Fra Giunta Bevegnati's Legenda (c. 1308) is the most extensive biography of any Franciscan Tertiary in the Middle Ages. Translated into English by Thomas Renna and Shannon Larson (Franciscan Institute Publications, 2012) from the critical Latin edition of Fortunato Iozzelli, O.F.M. (1997), it draws from Margaret's canonization proceedings, the penitential movement, popular legend, and the cult of women's saints. The translation preserves both the colloquial force of Margaret's dialogues and their historical grounding.
The Legenda was also directly shaped by the Laudario di Cortona, the hymnbook of the Confraternity of Santa Maria delle Laude — an influence that recent scholarship has traced in the structure and themes of the text itself.
F.M. Mahony's translation of the Life and Revelations of Saint Margaret of Cortona (Burns and Oates, London; later reprinted) offers an accessible English version of the full Legenda for general readers.
Fr. Cuthbert Hess's A Tuscan Penitent: The Life and Legend of St. Margaret of Cortona (Franciscan Classics, with an introduction by Lori Pieper, OFS) provides both a scholarly biography and a translation of key sections of the Legenda, making her story accessible to a contemporary Franciscan audience.
The Legenda is not a neutral historical document. It is a hagiographical text of the medieval genre, designed to present its subject as a saint to a specific audience with specific purposes. Scholars are right to note that "numerous mythical elements about Margaret's penitential practices eventually became integrated into her Legenda." What cannot be mythologized is the institutional record: the hospital existed, the confraternity existed, the charter of 1286 existed, the incorrupt body existed. The bones of the story are historical. The interpretation of the interior life is mediated through a confessor's literary choices.
This does not diminish her sanctity. It locates it accurately, in a human being whose life was documented by a human writer, within a human community — which is exactly where sanctity occurs.
What Her Patronages Mean
The Church's formal list of those under Margaret's patronage is worth reading slowly:
Sinners. Single mothers. The falsely accused. The homeless. Those with mental illness. Penitent women. Stepchildren. Orphans. Midwives. Reformed sinners.
This is not an arbitrary list. Every category on it is a category she personally inhabited. She was the single mother. She was the person whose door was closed on by her father's wife — herself once a stepchild, now the mother of one. She was the woman falsely accused when her reputation was attacked. She was the one who arrived in Cortona homeless, with nothing.
The patronage of those with mental illness reflects the tradition's recognition that her penitential extremes — the severe fasting, the attempted self-mutilation, the years of intense interior suffering that she described, at one point, as not knowing "whether she was on earth or in hell" — placed her in territory that modern understanding recognizes as psychologically complex. She is not the patron of those who struggle because she was immune to struggle. She is their patron because she struggled and was not destroyed by it.
The patronage of midwives reflects a detail that the main biographical accounts often omit: in her early years in Cortona, before the hospital was founded, the two De Moscari sisters arranged for Margaret to work as a midwife — a practical use of the experience and the sensitivity she had acquired at the castle and through her own maternity. She was successful at it. It was one of the ways she became embedded in the daily life of the city before her institutional work began.
Her Spiritual Significance: What She Teaches the Twenty-First Century
Margaret's life confronts two errors simultaneously — modern relativism and modern despair. She neither excused her sin nor doubted God's mercy. That double refusal is the heart of what she offers.
Contemporary culture tends toward one of two errors when dealing with personal failure. The first is minimization — nothing was really wrong, everything is relative, there is nothing to repent. The second is permanent condemnation — what was done cannot be undone, the past is a life sentence, mercy is theoretical and doesn't apply here. Margaret refused both.
She took her sin seriously. She named it publicly. She did not soften it, explain it away, or suggest that the castle at Montepulciano had been acceptable because she loved him. She spent twenty-nine years in penance — not morbid self-hatred, but the active, productive, creative penance of someone building something new out of what had been broken.
And she never doubted that God would receive her. The voice that asked poverella, what is your wish? was not the voice of a judge checking credentials. It was the voice of the Father running toward the returning child while the child was still a long way off.
That is the lesson. Penance, rightly understood, is not punishment extended indefinitely. It is restorative — the active rebuilding of what sin has broken, in oneself and then, necessarily, in the world outside oneself. Margaret's hospital was penance. Her Poverelle were penance. Her public preaching was penance. Her confrontation of the Bishop of Arezzo was penance. Every act of charity and justice she performed in Cortona was the penitent using the same energy that had once been spent on the wrong things and spending it now on the right ones.
She fell. She got up. And then she built a hospital.
The Saint in Art: The Dog, the Skull, and the Habit
In the visual tradition, Saint Margaret of Cortona is most consistently depicted with two attributes: a small dog at her feet, representing the animal that led her to her lover's grave and to the beginning of her conversion; and a skull or bones, the medieval memento mori symbolizing her contemplation of mortality and the transience of earthly things.
Jacopo Calvi (1740–1815), the Bolognese painter, depicted her in ecstasy in a brown Franciscan habit, grasping a cross held by an angel, her eyes fixed heavenward. The dominance of brownish tones, the deliberate absence of brighter hues, emphasizes both the Franciscan and penitential dimensions of her identity — the grey-brown wool as the visual statement of the life she chose over the jewels and silk of the castle.
The iconography of the Cortona confraternity also shaped how the Legenda was written, scholars have recently demonstrated — the Gothic Passion Crucifix before which Margaret prayed in ecstasy was not merely her devotional object but the image that organized the hagiographical imagination of everyone who recorded her life.
At a Glance
| Born | c. 1247, Laviano, Valdichiana, Tuscany (diocese of Chiusi) |
| Died | February 22, 1297, oratory of Saint Basil, Cortona, Tuscany |
| Feast Day | February 22 |
| Age at death | ~50 years |
| Order | Third Order of Saint Francis (Franciscan Tertiary) |
| Admitted to Third Order | 1277, after three years' probation |
| Canonized | May 16, 1728 — Pope Benedict XIII |
| Years between death and canonization | 431 years |
| Body | Incorrupt since 1456 — silver casket, Basilica of Santa Margherita, Cortona |
| Confessor and biographer | Fra Giunta Bevegnati, OFM (Legenda, c. 1308) |
| Also directed by | Fra Giovanni da Castiglione, OFM |
| Foundations | Hospital for the sick and poor (c. 1278) · Le Poverelle nursing congregation · Confraternity of Our Lady of Mercy |
| Civil charter | 1286, City of Cortona |
| Son | Jacopo — educated at Arezzo; became a Franciscan friar |
| Patron of | Sinners · Single mothers · The falsely accused · The homeless · Mental illness · Penitent women · Stepchildren · Orphans · Midwives · Franciscan Third Order |
| Titles | The New Mary Magdalene · Mirror of Sinners · Light of the Third Order of Francis |
| Key locution | "I have made you a mirror for sinners. You are a ladder for sinners, that they may come to me through your example." |
| Her answer | "I neither seek nor wish for aught but Thee, my Lord Jesus." |
Primary and Secondary Sources
Primary:
- Fra Giunta Bevegnati, Legenda de vita et miraculis beatae Margaritae de Cortona (c. 1308). Critical Latin edition: Fortunato Iozzelli, O.F.M. (Grottaferrata, 1997)
- Life and Revelations of Saint Margaret of Cortona, tr. F.M. Mahony (Burns and Oates, London / M.H. Gill & Sons, Dublin)
Translations:
- Thomas Renna and Shannon Larson, The Life and Miracles of Saint Margaret of Cortona (1247–1297) (Franciscan Institute Publications, 2012)
- Fr. Cuthbert Hess, A Tuscan Penitent: The Life and Legend of St. Margaret of Cortona, Franciscan Classics (with introduction by Lori Pieper, OFS)
Scholarly:
- Joanna Cannon and AndrΓ© Vauchez, Margherita of Cortona and the Lorenzetti: Sienese Art and the Cult of a Holy Woman in Medieval Tuscany (Penn State UP, 1999)
- Mary Harvey Doyno, "The Creation of a Franciscan Lay Saint: Margaret of Cortona and her Legenda," Past & Present 228:1 (2015), pp. 57–91
- Laura Corti and Riccardo Spinelli (eds.), Margherita da Cortona. Una storia emblematica di devozione narrata per testi e immagini (Milan: Electa, 1998)
- Research in Confraternitas 30:1–2 (2019) on the Laudario di Cortona connection
Online:
- Catholic Encyclopedia (New Advent): newadvent.org
- EWTN: ewtn.com — "St. Margaret of Cortona: the Second Magdalene"
- Wikipedia: Margaret of Cortona
- Medieval Histories: medieval.eu
- Cortona Mia: cortonamia.com
- National Catholic Register: ncregister.com
- The Catholic Brief: thecatholicbrief.com
"She who fell to the ground a sinner arose a penitent."
That is the whole story. Every detail is evidence.
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