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Article contents
Performing the Passion: Strategies for Salvation in the Life of Stefana Quinzani (d. 1530)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
In Italy, the years around 1500 were fraught for a number of reasons. There were renewed fears about the second coming of Christ and the end of the world. The expansion of the Ottoman Empire gave rise to a sense of instability and impending doom. In this climate many people became increasingly concerned about their fate in the afterlife and the need to be prepared for death and judgement. Central to this was the doctrine of purgatory. Yet, in the first decades of the sixteenth century, ideas surrounding purgatory were highly contested as heretical ideas from northern Europe began to filter into northern Italy. This paper investigates Catholic beliefs about the alleviation of purgatorial suffering through a case study of one holy woman from the north of Italy, the Dominican tertiary, Stefana Quinzani, who, according to a letter of 4 March 1500 written by Duke Ercole d’Este, endured every Friday ‘the whole of the Passion in her body, stage by stage, from the Flagellation to the Deposition from the Cross’.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Studies in Church History , Volume 45: The Church, the Afterlife and the Fate of the Soul , 2009 , pp. 218 - 227
- Copyright
- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2009
References
* I would like to thank Gabriele Neher of the University of Nottingham for her generous help on aspects of Brescian history during this period.
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