The heretic saint: Guglielma of Bohemia, Milan, and Brunate (1).

High above Lake Como in Lombardy, overlooking the cathedral city of Como and the southwestern branch of the lake, looms the tiny village of Brunate. It is a picturesque spot, beloved of mountain climbers, which enjoyed a brief heyday as a tourist mecca in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. An efficient if ear-popping funicular railway, inaugurated in 1894, now scales the steep cliff in a brisk seven minutes. But in the Middle Ages, when most of our story is set, Brunate was as remote and inaccessible a site as one could hope to find. A hagiographer around 1600 described it as an "ignoble village on that mountain whose vast ridge towers above the city to the east.... The mountain is arduous and laborious to climb." (2) In 1578 the village had a mere 156 inhabitants, and as late as 1900 its year-round population was barely over 500. (3)

From the top of the funicular line, a stairway leads up to the baroque church of San Andrea, whose cheerful pink facade opens onto the village's main piazza (Figure 1). Inside is a crystal reliquary holding the bones of Brunate's own beata, the Augustinian abbess Maddalena Albrizzi (d. 1465), beatified in 1907. An unremarkable modern painting represents Albrizzi in a nun's habit, holding a crucifix. On the north wall of the church is another painting in an elaborate marble frame (Figure 2)--this one a fresco from circa 1450, older than the surviving fabric of the church itself. Around 1745, in the course of renovations, the fresco was cut out of the wall that had supported it, framed at considerable expense, and moved to its present, awkward location on the pier of an arch. (4) The dominant figure is another local favorite, St. Guglielma, whose unofficial feast is celebrated each year on the fourth Sunday of April. (5) Her feast is "unofficial" because, unlike Maddalena Albrizzi, St. Guglielma does not appear in the Acta Sanctorum or even the local martyrology, nor is she honored anywhere but in the village of Brunate. In view of the romance that constitutes her legend, one might wonder if she is only a figure of folklore, like Saint Christopher and a hundred others demoted in the reforms after Vatican II.

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The truth, however, is far stranger. The woman called Guglielma was real enough, but even in her lifetime, she was already one of those mysterious, spellbinding figures whose destiny is to attract the powerful projections of others, for better and worse. Around 1260 she arrived in Milan from parts unknown, apparently a widow, and adopted the life of a pinzochera--a religious woman living independently in her own home, much like the beguines of northern Europe. Her simple but charismatic teaching and her reputation as a healer quickly attracted disciples, both women and men, who clung to her and to one another with fierce loyalty. It was persistently rumored that she was a daughter of the King of Bohemia--a rumor that may have been true, and, whether it was or not, significantly enhanced Guglielma's claims to sanctity. By the time of her death on August 24, 1281, she was the center of a devoted religious famiglia. Buried in the Cistercian abbey of Chiaravalle, she immediately became the object of a saint cult with all the usual trappings. But canonization was not to be Guglielma's fate, for the ambitions of her inner circle extended far beyond it. Inspired by a man she called her "firstborn son," the layman Andrea Saramita, and a nun of the Umiliate order, Sister Maifreda da Pirovano, more than three dozen mostly upper-class citizens of Milan had come to believe that Guglielma was no less than the Holy Spirit herself, incarnate in the form of a woman. Despite her own vigorous denials, these devotees taught that the Holy Spirit had come to found a new, inclusive church, superseding the corrupt one ruled by Boniface VIII, and through her, Jews, pagans, and Saracens would be saved. After Guglielma's resurrection and ascension, this utopian church would be led by her "earthly vicar"--none other than Sister Maifreda, the papessa of the age to come. (6)

All this is heady stuff and, needless to say, heresy. Two decades after Guglielma's death, the activities of her apostles came, inevitably, to the attention of a Dominican tribunal charged with conducting inquisitions in Milan. In a lengthy trial extending from July through December of 1300, the year of jubilee, these inquisitors interrogated at least thirty-three citizens, including Saramita and Maifreda, both of whom paid for their doctrine with their lives. (7) A second nun, Sister Giacoma dei Bassani da Nova, was also burned at the stake, while many others were sentenced to wear penitential crosses and pay hefty fines. Guglielma herself was posthumously condemned on the basis of a confession almost certainly extracted by torture from Saramita. The Dominicans were less interested in ascertaining her genuine beliefs than in expunging her cult, which they could do only by exhuming her body--a desecration that would have been unlawful were she not a proven heretic. Having created the evidence they required, the inquisitors proceeded to have Guglielma's tomb dismantled, her images destroyed, her disciples' writings consigned to the fire, her bones burned and their ashes scattered, her memory utterly damned.

Nevertheless, a hundred and fifty years after these tragic events, someone in the obscure church of Brunate, where no inquisitor ever thought to go, took the trouble to commission a painting of this very saint, or rather, condemned heretic. As we shall see, the extant painting once accompanied an entire cycle of scenes from St. Guglielma's legend. But the painting that survives was preserved for a reason. It has for centuries been the object of veneration, and unlike the lost narrative cycle, it refers directly to the heretical beliefs of the thirteenth-century sect. For I believe we can identify the persons kneeling before St. Guglielma as none other than the ill-fated Sister Maifreda and Andrea Saramita. These are not random devotees, nor does Guglielma's fifteenth-century legend include any episode in which a nun and a bourgeois layman kneel to receive the saint's blessing. Rather, the clothing of these two figures marks them as precisely those disciples who were most deeply involved in spreading the doctrine of Guglielma's divinity. The figure of the saint herself, dressed in purple damask befitting her royal status, was until recently decked with a golden coronet above her wimple. (8) More tellingly, she wears three golden rings, two on her right hand which is raised in blessing, one on her left. The three rings, hardly a standard iconographic attribute, probably symbolize Guglielma's special relationship to the Trinity: two on her right hand to signify Father and Son, one on her left to represent the Holy Spirit--and with this hand she consecrates her earthly vicar. (9) Behind Sister Maifreda, who kneels in prayer, Saramita with his arms piously crossed over his breast awaits a blessing. (10) Although the faces have likely been retouched over the centuries, they have a portrait-like specificity: Guglielma's expression is stern to the point of fierceness. Behind her, the upper half of the panel is filled by a banner or tapestry of deep blue and gold brocade, whose ermine-lined borders again denote royalty. A scroll unfurled across this banner leaves room for a lengthy inscription that, alas, has long been illegible. (11)

The mystery of how the heretic of Milan became the saint of Brunate, once solved, throws a sharp light on the relationship between official and unofficial religion. Like the more celebrated history of Joan of Arc, Guglielma's trajectory leads from fervent veneration in her lifetime through heretication and burning to vindication as the object of an approved saint cult, which in the twentieth century extended even to the publication of indulgenced prayers. Although Guglielma's story is less spectacular than Joan's, it is still more irregular, since in her case no formal act of rehabilitation, much less canonization, intervened between the trial of 1300 and the fifteenth-century renewal of her cult. Instead, what we find is an unlikely convergence of popular piety, dynastic pride, female solidarity, and theatrical performance, winning a small but remarkable triumph over the forces of repression. Since a key factor in Guglielma's return to grace turns out to have been a play, I will present the vicissitudes of her life, death, and afterlife as a tragicomedy in five acts.

ACT ONE: A BOHEMIAN PRINCESS IN MILAN?

TO begin with the setting, Milan in the mid-thirteenth century was a hotbed of religious discontent. On April 6, 1252 a Dominican inquisitor, Peter of Verona, was on his way back to Milan after celebrating Easter in Como when he was ambushed and murdered--not by the Cathars he was prosecuting, but by leading Milanese citizens who resented the inquisitors' prominence in civic life. Only a year later he was canonized as "St. Peter Martyr." (12) His enormous marble sarcophagus--a masterpiece of fourteenth-century sculpture--still dominates the Portinari Chapel at the ancient church of Sant' Eustorgio, where the Dominicans held their trials. From that point onward at least one inquisitor was always stationed there, while a group of eight controlled the office of inquisition for all Lombardy. (13) The Franciscans, usually at odds with their rival order, also had friars and tertiaries in Milan, and the predominantly female order of Umiliate had several houses, the most important being the convent of Santa Caterina di Biassono, where Sister Maifreda lived. (14) This order had come some distance from its radical origins to attain upper-class respectability--a familiar story in women's monasticism. Devout single women who did not wish to take vows as nuns or tertiaries could embrace the apostolic life as pinzochere, a more independent and therefore suspect option that did not require alliance with a particular order. Beyond the city walls to the southeast lay the great abbey of Chiaravalle, named after Clairvaux and founded by St. Bernard in 1135. (15) Despite the primitive Cistercian mystique of "wilderness," Chiaravalle was very much an urban institution, the center of a group of religiously active laity who attended festivals and sermons there. Many of these, including Guglielma and some of her friends, entered into contracts of vitalizio with the abbey--a form of spiritual life insurance whereby they bequeathed their property to the monks in return for support as long as they lived, inclusion in the monastic community of prayer, and burial at the abbey with commemorative masses. (16)

The secular clergy and laity stood under the jurisdiction of their archbishop, who as of 1262 was Ottone Visconti. But the Visconti, whose rise to power was just beginning, were bitter rivals of the Della Torre family, which ruled Milan at that point and refused to let the new bishop enter his city until 1277, when he finally did so by force of arms. In the meantime Milan lay under interdict, deprived of the sacraments. (17) In this context of civil and religious strife, it is not surprising that heresy had a certain appeal, especially when it offered some way beyond a patently corrupt institutional church. In particular, the prophetic ideas of the ex-Cistercian Joachim of Fiore (d. 1202) were embraced by the more radical branch of the Franciscan order, the so-called Spirituals, as well as some of the common people. Joachim, whose teachings were not condemned during his lifetime, had prophesied the advent of a Third Age or status of the Holy Spirit, superseding the ages of God the Father (the Old Testament era) and God the Son (from the Incarnation through his own days). Following an elaborate system of biblical typology, Joachim had predicted that the new age would begin in 1260, heralding the inauguration of an ecclesia spiritualis in which grace, spiritual knowledge, and contemplative gifts would be diffused to all. (18) Coincidentally or not, it was around 1260 that Guglielma, escorted by a grown son, appeared in Milan.

But whence? Maddeningly, we do not know and are not likely to find out. Since the inquisitors burned her followers' original writings, the only surviving primary source is the trial record (Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana A.227), which is itself incomplete but includes four official notebooks filled with interrogations and depositions. (19) Only a small number of the Dominicans' questions pertained to Guglielma's life and teachings; the majority concerned beliefs and practices of her devotees. Their first question to Saramita, however, was whether he had known Guglielma in her lifetime. When he acknowledged that he had, they asked "if he knew or had heard where this Guglielma was from. He answered yes, she was a daughter of the late king of Bohemia, as it was said. Asked if he had sought out the truth concerning this, he answered yes: he, Andrea, had gone to the king of Bohemia and found the king dead, and found that it was so." (20) This cryptic testimony was confirmed by a secular priest, Mirano da Garbagnate, who had accompanied Saramita on his journey from Milan to Prague. (21) In February 1302, long after the burning of Guglielma's bones, the lay brother Marchisio Secco testified in the mopping-up phase of the trial that she "had been a woman of good birth, and it was said that she was a sister of the king of Bohemia." (22)

The kings in question would have been Premysl Otakar I (regn. 1198-1230), Guglielma's father, and his son and heir, Wenceslas or Vaclav I (regn. 1230-1253). Wenceslas in turn was succeeded by his son Premysl Otakar II, who was killed in battle in 1278, leaving a child as heir. A disastrous interregnum followed his defeat, and the throne remained vacant until 1283. (23) Andrea Saramita must have visited Prague in the spring or summer of 1282, since we know he was still in Milan for the solemn translation of Guglielma's body in October 1281. During his sojourn in Bohemia, then, he would indeed have "found the king dead." Now it is most unlikely that a citizen of Milan, testifying in 1300, would have known or cared that there had been a Bohemian interregnum exactly eighteen years earlier unless he had actually been there; nor would he have made such a difficult and expensive journey without good reason. That reason, as it later emerged, was to notify the royal family of Guglielma's death in order to obtain support for her canonization. Saramita's hopes were not unfounded, for the royal houses of Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland were famous for nurturing saintly princesses. If Guglielma was a daughter of Premysl Otakar I by his second wife, Queen Constance of Hungary, then she was also a first cousin of St. Elizabeth of…