I. Introduction
Around 1260, a woman named Guglielma arrived in Milan with a son and eventually became a pinzochera, or a freelance female penitent, who wore a simple brown habit without taking vows.Footnote 1 Guglielma was reportedly a Bohemian princess originally named Felice and was the daughter of King Otakar I (r. 1198–1230) and Queen Constance.Footnote 2 Over the next two decades, she attracted a following of devotees whom she privately instructed, and she also became an oblate at the Cistercian Abbey of Chiaravalle outside the city. She died in August 1281, and one of her devotees, Andrea Saramita, arranged to have her body transferred in late October from her parish church of San Pietro all’Orto in Milan to Chiaravalle.Footnote 3
Guglielma’s body did not remain there. In September 1300, Dominican inquisitors ordered the disinterment and burning of her body. Though the monks, as well as devotees, venerated her as a saint, the inquisitors were investigating those devotees for the third time for adoring her as the Holy Spirit incarnate. At least some of the devotees called themselves the Children of the Holy SpiritFootnote 4 and looked to two individuals for guidance: Sr. Maifreda da Pirovano, a nun in the Humiliati house of Biassono, who would become Guglielma’s vicar on earth in a future age, and the previously mentioned Andrea Saramita, a layman whom Guglielma reportedly had called her first begotten. By the end of the trial, the inquisitors quashed the devotees not only by burning Guglielma’s remains but also by abandoning Maifreda, Andrea, and at least one other devotee to secular authorities as relapsed heretics.Footnote 5 Though the veneration of Guglielma as either a saint or the Holy Spirit mostly died out, misogynistic sermon exempla twisted the Children of the Holy Spirit into an orgiastic sex cult led by Guglielma and Andrea.Footnote 6
The Carthusian monk Matteo Valerio’s discovery of partial records of the 1300 inquisitorial process in a grocer’s shop in Pavia in the seventeenth century rescued Guglielma and her devotees from such historical inaccuracies. These records, now in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana di Milano, are four notebooks of the notary Beltramo Salvagno from the first decade of the 1300s, but the notebooks of other notaries, including most of the sentences, are no longer extant.Footnote 7 Based on these records, modern scholars have rejected the orgiastic sex cult myth, but issues of gender have remained at the forefront. While nineteenth and early twentieth-century historians did the vital work of uncovering the devotees’ political and socio-economic backgrounds, they often dismissed the devotees’ beliefs as absurd delusions and portrayed the involvement of men in a supposedly women’s heresy as bizarre.Footnote 8 Since the 1970s, scholars have moved away from this dismissive approach, but they do not deny the centrality of women in the group, and some even argue that Guglielma’s devotees inverted the ecclesiastical gender hierarchy.Footnote 9 In particular, Barbara Newman suggests that the Christ-Guglielma redemptive pairing and the Andrea-Maifreda partnership reflected gender complementarity in completing human salvation, and the latter was similar to the relationship between women religious and male clerics.Footnote 10 In these partnerships, clergy – often mendicants – submitted to the prophetic authority of female mystics joined to Christ by suffering, but the women’s perceived feminine weakness did not threaten the men’s institutional authority and the women’s subordination to their clerical partners.Footnote 11 More focused on Maifreda and Andrea’s relationship, Janine Peterson argues that the devotees’ heretical nature and Andrea’s lay status allowed Maifreda and Andrea to reverse gender roles in contrast to the orthodox holy woman–male cleric partnership.Footnote 12
The focus on gender–role inversions has helped to better contextualize the devotees within thirteenth-century religiosity, but Marina Benedetti suggests that such an emphasis on gender has obscured the Children of the Holy Spirit’s complexity and Maifreda and Andrea’s roles.Footnote 13 Her argument is part of a trend that questions that heretical groups were often pro-feminine and inclusive in favor of more nuanced interpretations that religious dissenters did not necessarily give women leadership roles significantly more or less than the medieval church did, and when women did have more prominent roles, such as among the late medieval Lollards, those positions often corresponded with their elevated social status.Footnote 14 Furthermore, Caroline Walker Bynum’s studies on medieval women’s religiosity call into question a focus on gender binaries. Male clergy often cast radical conversion to religious life in terms of gender role reversals to center on rupture and the renunciation of power and focused on binary gender opposites. In contrast, religious women stressed continuity when entering religious life, not gender inversion, since gender reversals for women would have entailed assuming masculine power, and they equated the physical humanity of Christ with women.Footnote 15
In the case of the Children of the Holy Spirit, we are almost entirely dependent on male clergy who produced the surviving notebooks for our understanding of the group. The records pose numerous problems as an abbreviated paraphrase of the original transcripts that put the answers of the witnesses into the third person. Much of the records consist of the inquisitors, especially Guido da Cocconato and Rainerio da Pirovano, asking specific questions about the devotees’ beliefs and practices. What emerges from the questioning appears to be a rough parallel between Guglielma and Christ: Just as Christ rose from the dead, ascended into heaven, redeemed Christians, and made Peter his vicar on earth, Guglielma, as the Holy Spirit, would rise again, ascend into heaven, redeem Jews and pagans, and establish Maifreda as her vicar on earth. Marina Benedetti suggests that these parallels resulted from the inquisitors’ questions reshaping the devotees’ varied beliefs, which she and Grado Merlo call spiritual dreams (sogni spirituali). Footnote 16 The surviving records are also no longer in their original chronological order since the inquisitors probably rearranged the records to focus on Maifreda and Andrea as the leaders.Footnote 17
Yet, inquisitors also had access to the devotees’ no longer extant writings, to which the inquisitors and devotees made numerous references and which the inquisitors undoubtedly destroyed. These texts included a book of litanies composed by Maifreda, letters composed by one of the devotees, and supposedly new gospels, epistles, and prophecies, many of which the inquisitors assumed Andrea wrote to replace the Old and New Testaments.Footnote 18 The inquisitors likely read these texts as part of their investigation and formulated many of their questions, especially about the Guglielma-Christ analogy, based on these writings. But the texts probably neither presented systematic beliefs nor represented a consensus among the devotees, and the inquisitors had to interpret the texts and formulate questions based on their reading.
Indeed, the inquisitors appeared to look for gender inversion and a female hierarchy. They interrogated twenty-two women versus twelve men, though we should keep in mind the incomplete nature of the records.Footnote 19 Outside of the notebooks, the German Dominican Annals of Colmar provides additional evidence for a clerical focus on women. For the year 1301, the annalist recounted how Friar Johannes of Wissembourg, whom the notary recorded as present for Andrea’s interrogation on August 13, saw in 1300 the ashes of an eloquent virgin from England, who was posthumously burnt in Milan and had proclaimed herself the Holy Spirit incarnate in a woman to redeem and baptize women.Footnote 20 Johannes, or the annalist, apparently misunderstood Guglielma’s origin story, but more importantly, his interpretation did not take into account the evident involvement of men, including Andrea, by concentrating exclusively on women. The inquisitors probably shared the same male clerical emphasis on gender binaries. In their focus on the Guglielma-Christ analogy, they seemed to expect that the devotees, by recognizing a woman’s divinity, also turned Guglielma into another Christ and embraced gender inversion.
But there is little reason to assume that all the laywomen, laymen, and Humiliati sisters among the devotees adopted this clerical perspective. Accordingly, this article will argue that the Children of the Holy Spirit transcended the gender binary in Maifreda and Andrea’s co-leadership and in their vision of the church hierarchy in the coming age, and the devotees stressed continuity by seeing Guglielma’s divine mission in terms of the comfort she had given them in life and by anticipating a relatively peaceful transition between the present age and the next age without a substantial transformation of the social hierarchy. The article will first examine how the Children of the Holy Spirit foresaw a future age in which a woman would be pope without creating an all-female church hierarchy and how Maifreda’s religious status and social prominence influenced how Maifreda and Andrea were able to share leadership. Then it will consider how, within a diversity of beliefs about Guglielma as the Holy Spirit, the devotees stressed Guglielma sharing in Christ’s physical humanity and saw her as the Paraclete who brought consolation to devotees and non-Christians and reconciled enemies. Finally, we will see how the devotees in planned Masses to inaugurate the New Age of the Holy Spirit and in an actual Mass on Easter 1300 included both women and men in the church hierarchy while also stressing the future age’s growth out of the current age and its established social order.
II. Women and Men in the New Age
During the inquisitors’ investigation into the devotees in 1300, many witnesses seemed to confirm the Christ-Guglielma analogy that Guglielma was the Holy Spirit, would rise from the dead, ascend into heaven, usher in a new age, and establish new Scriptures.Footnote 21 The priest, Mirano of San Ferno, who once served as Maifreda and Andrea’s secretary before he left their fellowship, told the inquisitors that he often heard Maifreda and Andrea say, “Guglielma was supposed to rise again and ascend into heaven in the sight of the devotees of St. Guglielma.”Footnote 22 He then added that after Guglielma’s ascension, “They were to change the law, make new gospels, and create cardinals and orders.”Footnote 23 This description of a new age suggests influence from Joachimism.Footnote 24 Joachim of Fiore (1135–1203) was a late twelfth-century Calabrian abbot and biblical commentator who articulated complex divisions of time to explain the working of the Trinity in history, including the three overlapping status, or stages, of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The third status of the Holy Spirit is the millennial reign of Christ from the twentieth chapter of The Apocalypse of St. John, during which Christians would experience peace.Footnote 25 Joachim’s influence spread relatively quickly in Italy and beyond, but after 1250, many who adhered to his apocalyptic vision, such as the Spiritual Franciscans, were mainly familiar with Pseudo-Joachimite works and significantly modified his eschatology.Footnote 26 For example, though Joachim foresaw the pope as the leader of a purified church in the third status, later Joachimites emphasized how a future angelic pope (pastor angelicus) would renew the church after a struggle with a papal antichrist and his carnal church. Indeed, by 1300, some even identified Pope Boniface VIII as a papal antichrist in light of the controversy surrounding Pope Celestine V’s abdication and Boniface’s elevation.Footnote 27 Joachimite influence was not limited to the clergy. Just as the Catalan layman and physician Arnau de Vilanova (d. 1311) produced his own Joachimite writings, devotees, such as Andrea and Maifreda, were conceivably familiar with Joachimism.Footnote 28
However, the devotees significantly adapted Joachimite eschatology to their focus on Guglielma’s divinity, including a female pope. According to the sisters-in-law and noblewomen, Pietra di Alzate and Catella dei Giozi, “Maifreda was supposed to be the pope and vicar of Christ on earth, just as Blessed Peter the Apostle was the vicar of Christ, and … she was supposed to have the power of binding just as Blessed Peter, because just as the Holy Spirit was in the form of a woman in Guglielma, so Maifreda was supposed to be Guglielma’s vicar in the form of a woman.”Footnote 29 Though many devotees mentioned that Maifreda would become Guglielma’s vicar on earth, only these two women made the explicit connection between the Holy Spirit becoming a woman and the pope being a woman, which is both a clear analogy with Christ and St. Peter and parallels the Catholic argument that Christ’s maleness excluded women from the priesthood.Footnote 30 At the same time, Pietra and Catella were not necessarily saying that Guglielma’s femininity required that the entirety of the church hierarchy consist of women since they only applied it to Maifreda’s papacy.Footnote 31 A few devotees mentioned that there would be apostles, co-disciples, and, more specifically, new cardinals, archbishops, and bishops, and the only devotee identified as a cardinal was the poor seamstress woman Taria dei Pontari.Footnote 32 In their joint testimony, Pietra and Catella also mentioned, “All the female devotees of Guglielma were to baptize and were to be apostles of Christ.”Footnote 33 Perhaps in light of their previous statement, these two women believed that only women would be apostles, but more likely, the notary simply did not include the words devoti et (“male devotees and”), just as the notary did not include the words et devote (“and female devotees”) when the inquisitors asked Ottorino da Garbagnate whether “the male devotees of Guglielma were apostles and disciples of the Holy Spirit, that is of Guglielma.”Footnote 34
Maifreda was not Guglielma’s future pope solely because of theological reasons; rather, as Britt Istoft suggests, Maifreda already acted in a quasi-sacerdotal leadership capacity after Guglielma’s death, and she even wrote a book of litanies.Footnote 35 Numerous devotees recounted how Maifreda distributed hosts to them.Footnote 36 For example, Sibilla dei Malconzati confessed, “Sr. Maifreda placed [the hosts] in the mouth of Lady Sibilla in reverence and devotion of St. Guglielma.”Footnote 37 A couple of witnesses even claimed that Maifreda did not merely distribute hosts but blessed them as well.Footnote 38 In addition to distributing communion, Maifreda also preached to small gatherings comprised mainly of women but also a few men at Biassono and, after her sisters expelled her for such gatherings in 1298, at the house of Guglielmo Cotica.Footnote 39 Maifreda explained that when some devotees gathered at Biassono, “She recited some miracles from the gospels and epistles and others from the Apostles.”Footnote 40 Beyond maybe being a persuasive preacher, why the devotees believed she was Guglielma’s vicar is unclear. By her own admission, Maifreda did not know Guglielma well; perhaps, for this reason, she claimed to have a vision of Guglielma in her final testimony on August 20, 1300, “St. Guglielma appeared to [her] after her death, … and [Maifreda] said that St. Guglielma instructed [her] to compose the foresaid [litanies about Guglielma].”Footnote 41 Other devotees seemed to accept these visions as authentic in their testimonies.Footnote 42 Regardless, Maifreda’s role as pope seemed to grow out of the devotees’ lived experiences.
Perhaps Maifreda’s social background and religious status help to explain her prominent role. Because she was the maternal cousin of Matteo Visconti, the signore of Milan, and came from the noble Pirovano family,Footnote 43 she was more likely to have a leadership role than the previously mentioned seamstress Taria. In addition, she was a Humiliati nun, which provided theological underpinnings for her role. In Joachim’s writings, at the end of the second status and the reign of the antichrist, contemplative monks would herald the third status in which Christian society would resemble a seven-fold monastery. A monastic spiritual father, who was probably the pope, would lead this community, which would include not only contemplative monks but also clergy and married men and women.Footnote 44 This vision for Christian society conceivably shaped the devotees’ spiritual dreams through Joachim’s potential influence on the Humiliati Order, which was divided into the three orders of canons and canonesses, monks and nuns, such as Maifreda, and lay people.Footnote 45 The devotees similarly included contemplative nuns, secular priests, widows, and married men and women, and they perhaps saw Maifreda as the spiritual father.
Because of Maifreda’s social reality, Maifreda and Andrea also needed to build a partnership rooted in pragmatism rather than a theologically based gender role reversal. Maifreda belonged to a relatively wealthy house, and the Humiliati Order gave a significant role to women, including the ability to elect their ministers, typically from the noble class, and to realize their spiritual and economic abilities through good works and labor. At the same time, the Humiliati brothers, not the sisters, primarily though not exclusively dealt with the world on behalf of the sisters.Footnote 46 This perhaps explains why Andrea had such an important leadership role next to her. As a layman, Andrea could move freely to foster connections between the monks of Chiaravalle, the Humiliati, and the other devotees. In 1274, Andrea served as the abbey’s agent to buy a house for Guglielma.Footnote 47 After Guglielma’s death, not only did he travel to Bohemia in an attempt to inform Guglielma’s supposed royal family of her death, but he also arranged with Guglielmo, the Marquis of Montferrat and the capitano generale of Milan, for an armed guard to accompany Guglielma’s body from her original burial place at San Pietro all’Orto to the abbey outside the city during a war between Milan and Lodi in 1281.Footnote 48 In contrast, though Andrea sent her a vial of the water and wine used to wash Guglielma’s corpse during the transferal, there is no mention of Maifreda ever visiting the tomb.Footnote 49 This probably has more to do with practical restraints on her as a woman and a nun, just as it did that more women cited Maifreda as their teacher than did men.Footnote 50
Throughout most of her testimonies during the trial, an undoubtedly terrified Maifreda often tried to shift blame and leadership to Andrea, and it is likely that they did not entirely agree on all theological points.Footnote 51 But, in her final testimony on August 20, she told the inquisitors, “The devotees certainly paid attention to Andrea Saramita, but they paid more attention to [her].”Footnote 52 Why did she suddenly claim a more prominent leadership role? Based on a heresy trial of Matteo Visconti and his sons in absentia in Avignon in 1320, resulting from a conflict between Pope John XXII and the Visconti over dominance in Lombardy, Matteo used his position as signore to impede the inquisition and specifically requested Maifreda’s release after she had already been abandoned to secular judgment.Footnote 53 It is possible that he even succeeded in preventing her execution until the rival Della Torre family expelled the Visconti in 1302.Footnote 54 Perhaps Maifreda, thinking she was in a relatively less precarious position, tried to protect Andrea by emphasizing her leadership and thus obscured what was actually a partnership that transcended rather than inverted gender roles.
The inquisitors were not only concerned about the devotees’ leadership but also insisted on identifying a heresiarch, or founder, in not only Andrea and Maifreda but also Guglielma.Footnote 55 When the inquisitors occasionally asked witnesses if Guglielma said that she was the Holy Spirit, they usually received a negative reply. According to Maifreda’s third testimony on August 6, “Sometimes when St. Guglielma was asked by some person to take away a tribulation or pain or something similar from them, she responded, ‘Go, I am not God.’”Footnote 56 Maifreda said this before the inquisitors ordered the destruction of Guglielma’s body between September 3 and September 9, and could have been trying to protect it, but three other devotees made similar claims after its destruction, when lying to protect her remains was pointless.Footnote 57 Allegranza dei Perusi, on September 19, testified that when she told Guglielma that Andrea was teaching that she was the Holy Spirit, Guglielma “held this as evil and [said] that she [Guglielma] was a worthless woman and a worthless worm.”Footnote 58 Likewise, according to ser Danisio Cotta on October 27, Guglielma censured Andrea in front of Danisio and another devotee for saying that she was divine: “You are foolish to say about me and believe about me what is not [true]. I was born of a man and a woman.”Footnote 59 Finally, in a testimony from about a year and half later in February 1302, Marchisio Secco, a lay penitent at Chiaravalle, told the inquisitors that when Andrea told him that Guglielma was the Holy Spirit, and Marchisio disagreed, they went together to ask Guglielma who irately scolded them: “She was made of flesh and bone and she also brought a son to the city of Milan, and that she was not what they believed, and unless they did penance concerning those words that they said about her, they would go to hell.”Footnote 60 Though Secco might have lied to protect the abbey’s reputation, by 1302, it would have probably been clear that the inquisitors were not going to investigate the monks.Footnote 61
In contrast, all affirmations that Guglielma claimed to be the Holy Spirit depend on Andrea’s reportedly close relationship with Guglielma and what he told people. The only reference to Guglielma calling him her first begotten (primogenitum) is from Francesco da Garbagnate’s testimony referencing a letter in which he called Andrea primo unigenito or first begotten, because Guglielma instructed Andrea first.Footnote 62 Andrea probably was one of Guglielma’s first devotees, but that does not mean that she taught him that she was the Holy Spirit or agreed with his statements about her. Indeed, Andrea was absent at Guglielma’s death, and while circumstances could have prevented his presence, in light of Guglielma’s rebukes of Andrea, she conceivably did not want him at her deathbed when she would have wanted to have a good death.Footnote 63 Moreover, after denying Guglielma claimed divinity in previous testimonies,Footnote 64 only in his final testimony on August 22, did Andrea confess that Guglielma had once told him that she was the Holy Spirit and that “she had descended from heaven with light and with great lightning when she descended upon a marble stone.”Footnote 65 Another devotee, Sibilla dei Malconzati, said on September 3 that Andrea once told her and other devotees that Guglielma demonstrated her divinity by turning a chair into an ox.Footnote 66 Though evidence here for Guglielma’s self-identification as the Holy Spirit is thin, Maifreda on August 6 recalled that another devotee told her that inquisitors had once summoned Guglielma.Footnote 67 Someone had possibly informed the inquisitors that Guglielma made claims of divinity, but the summons resulted in no known action. Andrea and Sibilla possibly placed the blame on Guglielma under torture or the threat of torture.Footnote 68 Perhaps the inquisitors, concerned about a deeply rooted belief in Guglielma’s divinity and wanting to suppress the veneration of Guglielma, justified destroying her body by ensuring that there was evidence of her heresy. Alternatively, Andrea and Sibilla perhaps misunderstood Guglielma’s words through the lens of their belief in her divinity. Regardless, the inquisitors were as receptive to the idea that Guglielma first taught the heresy as they were to the notion that the devotees reversed gender roles.
Ultimately, neither Guglielma nor Maifreda nor even Andrea – despite the latter two’s clear leadership roles – were the sole originators of a belief that Guglielma was the Holy Spirit.Footnote 69 While Andrea admitted to working with Maifreda to elaborate on ideas about Guglielma, such as claiming that the archangel Rafael had announced Guglielma’s conception to Queen Constance of Bohemia just as Gabriel had to the Virgin Mary,Footnote 70 such embellishments do not make them the originators. Though the inquisitors appeared to think Maifreda or Andrea were at least the primary teachers of heresy based on their questions, the interrogated devotees failed to provide a clear answer. Many devotees claimed that Andrea taught them, and one devotee did refer to Andrea as the leader, but others pointed to Maifreda, some to both, and one to Taria, the seamstress woman. Maifreda even claimed that Bellacara dei Carentani was the first to believe that Guglielma was the Holy Spirit.Footnote 71 Though these answers resulted from the inquisitors’ specific questions, the responses nevertheless reveal that there was no gender inversion with Maifreda in an undeniable preeminent role and Guglielma as the first teacher of a new heresy, and the testimonies also suggest that the devotees did not have systematic beliefs about Guglielma.
III. Guglielma the Holy Spirit
Only four statements in the surviving records attempt to explain Guglielma theologically, and they tend to emphasize Guglielma’s suffering and shared physical humanity with Christ rather than their shared divinity. Mirano di San Ferno told the inquisitors, “Just as Christ suffered in the form of a man, so Guglielma had to suffer in the form of a woman on account of the sins of false Christians and those who had crucified Christ.”Footnote 72 Though Mirano was the only witness to state this, the suffering might be a reference to Adelina da Crimella’s claim, according to the Third Order Humiliati Br. Gerardo da Novazzano, that Adelina had seen and touched the stigmata, or the five wounds of Christ, on Guglielma.Footnote 73 According to Andrea, devotees expected to see the wounds on Guglielma after her death, but they did not.Footnote 74 Though Adelina never mentioned the stigmata in her testimonies, she did provide a theological explanation of why she believed that Guglielma was the Holy Spirit: “I believe that Guglielma is the flesh which was born of the Virgin Mary and which was crucified on the cross in the person of Christ.”Footnote 75 Adelina’s belief that Guglielma had Christ’s five wounds could explain why she declared Guglielma’s body was the same as Christ’s body suffering on the cross. Similarly, according to Francesco da Garbagnate, a cleric, Guglielma once told Andrea and Maifreda that “from around the year 1262 the body of Christ was not sacrificed and consecrated alone, but with the body of the Holy Spirit that was Guglielma herself; whence Guglielma said that she did not desire to see the body of Christ nor the sacrifice because she saw herself.”Footnote 76 Some of Guglielma’s male devotees even acted on this equating of Guglielma’s body with that of Christ in the Eucharist by placing communion hosts on her tomb and sometimes bringing them to Maifreda to distribute.Footnote 77
The only other theological explanation does not mention suffering. When Sibilla dei Malconzati recalled that Andrea told her how Guglielma proved her divinity by turning a chair into an ox, she included Guglielma’s purported explanation: “If she had come in the form of a man, she would have died, as Christ died, and the whole world would have perished.”Footnote 78 That Guglielma’s death would have been detrimental is not incongruent with the previous statements about Guglielma’s suffering. Just as Francis of Assisi’s earliest hagiographer connected Francis’s stigmata with his attempted martyrdom in Egypt, Guglielma’s devotees perhaps saw her reported stigmata as the way in which she suffered with Christ without a literal martyrdom.Footnote 79
Regardless, Guglielma and her devotees were not unique in associating a holy woman with the physical suffering of Christ. Caroline Walker Bynum explains that women often saw themselves as joining with the suffering Christ on the cross in the Eucharist and that their human physicality allowed them to imitate Christ, who received his humanity from a woman, without gender inversion.Footnote 80 Indeed, Francesco might have misremembered or misunderstood the second-hand statement about the Eucharist. Since Milan in 1262 was under a papal interdict, Guglielma possibly refused to attend Mass during the suspension of the sacraments and associated her suffering with that of Christ.Footnote 81
For some devotees, such suffering had a clear end: the redemption of non-Christians through Guglielma. Just as Mirano had mentioned that Guglielma must suffer for false Christians and Jews, many witnesses mentioned that after Guglielma’s resurrection and ascension, she would redeem various non-Christian peoples, including the Jews and, depending on the testimony, Saracens (Muslims), pagans, or false Christians.Footnote 82 The conversion of Jews and other non-Christians was a pivotal event at the end of Joachim’s status of the Son or the beginning of the status of the Holy Spirit.Footnote 83 According to Maifreda, the devotees before 1284 had commissioned a painting over the altar at Biassono depicting Guglielma on the right freeing two prisoners representing Jews and Muslims on the left, and Maifreda explained, “Through [Guglielma] the Jews and Saracens were to be saved.”Footnote 84 In addition, Danisio Cotta explained that about twenty-two years before, when Guglielma was still alive, a devotee named Carmeo da Crema told him, “Through Guglielma, Jews and Saracens were to come to faith and salvation.”Footnote 85 The contract for the abbey’s purchase of Guglielma’s house in 1274 mentioned Carmerio da Pagazano as the late Carmeo da Crema’s son. This indicates that Carmeo died before 1274 and that well before Guglielma passed away in 1281, Carmeo told others that Guglielma would help save non-Christians. In light of this and the image in Biassono from before 1284, this belief was probably an early element of the devotee’s understanding of Guglielma. Interestingly, one of the prophetic texts that the inquisitors attributed to Andrea was entitled The Prophecy of the Prophet Carmeo to Such Cities and Nations (Prophetia Carmei prophete ad tales civitates et gentes), which perhaps Carmeo himself wrote.Footnote 86 Moreover, Cotta noticeably did not say that Guglielma would redeem non-Christians, as was the standard phrasing, but rather implied she would lead them to the Christian faith. The former was heterodox in Catholic theology, while the latter was not necessarily so, despite Cotta prudently saying it was. Hagiographies are replete with stories about woman saints, including St. Catherine of Alexandria, to whom devotees compared Guglielma, striving to convert non-Christians.Footnote 87 In a few testimonies, including one of Andrea’s, witnesses explained that after Maifreda becomes pope, she would baptize non-Christians and others outside the faith.Footnote 88 The devotees likely believed that Guglielma, rather than being a co-redeemer with Christ by completing the redemption of non-Christians, would help to bring non-Christians to conversion and baptism.
In fact, when the devotees commissioned paintings in Guglielma’s honor, there was little indication that they saw her as a literal co-redeemer with Christ. In addition to the painting at Biassono in which Guglielma liberated Jews and Muslims from spiritual prison, Mirano di San Ferno, before becoming a priest, painted images of Guglielma in three different churches in Milan under St. Catherine of Alexandria’s name.Footnote 89 While he did this from prudence, depicting her as St. Catherine indicates that perhaps he believed that Guglielma was bringing non-Christians to the Christian faith rather than completing Christ’s work by redeeming them. Moreover, in the tomb of Guglielma, the devotees or possibly the monks commissioned a painting of St. Bernard with Guglielma kneeling in front of the Virgin Mary with the Christ Child, and Guglielma’s face was red, a symbol of the Holy Spirit.Footnote 90 Despite the clear implications of her red face, the painting depicts her kneeling along with St. Bernard in veneration of the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child, not next to and equal with Christ. More boldly and not mentioned in the surviving inquisitorial records, nine kilometers southeast of Milan in the church of the Humiliati Abbey of Viboldone, Guglielma’s devotees perhaps commissioned a painting of the Trinity with the Holy Spirit depicted as a young woman, who was presumably Guglielma, seated next to Christ with a woman, possibly Maifreda, genuflecting to her.Footnote 91 This was a rare exception in which Guglielma is depicted as equal in status with Christ, but the image does so mostly within the traditional theology of the Trinity and not as a co-redeemer, which the Christ-Guglielma analogy in the inquisitors’ questions would suggest.
More common in the records than discussions of theology were references to the devotee’s lived experiences that reveal Guglielma’s role in their lives as both a holy woman and the Holy Spirit. For instance, when the inquisitors asked why Danisio assembled with people to whom he was not related, “He said that never was he so sad or desolate that if he went to [Guglielma], that he would not leave joyful and comforted by her.”Footnote 92 Danisio’s devotion to Guglielma was not predicated on a theological explanation, but on the comfort that she gave Danisio. Ser Bonadeo Carentano provided an example of the advice Guglielma gave devotees when she warned him, “Beware of perjuries, deceptions, and usuries.”Footnote 93 His daughters, Giovanna da Missaglia and Giacoma da Coppa, noted that they heard from Guglielma “good, honest, and religious words” and “good and honest words of instruction and devotion.”Footnote 94 In addition, Sibilla Malconzato recalled how Guglielma told Andrea, “His name will not die in eternity, and that through Guglielma many would have consolation and many would have tribulation.”Footnote 95 Though Sibilla repeated this explicitly through the lens of her belief that Guglielma was the Holy Spirit, the emphasis on consolation is similar to how Danisio, who repeatedly denied believing in Guglielma’s divinity, Bonadeo, and Bonadeo’s daughters discussed the comfort and advice that Guglielma gave them. As previously mentioned, Maifreda said that Guglielma turned away people who asked for help with tribulations and pain, but, according to Andrea, she supposedly healed Beltramo da Ferno’s eye and Albertone da Novate’s fistula.Footnote 96
The devotees continued to turn to Guglielma for comfort after her death. Sibilla dei Malconzati told the inquisitors that she had made a vow once to Guglielma and was freed from an infirmity.Footnote 97 Likewise, Marchisio Secco in 1302 said that around 1296 he lit a lamp at the tomb of Guglielma because many other people had done so and had been liberated from their infirmities.Footnote 98 Though veneration of Guglielma as a saint probably inspired such devotions, Guglielma’s denial of divinity in Maifreda’s testimony was specifically connected with people requesting that Guglielma heal them. Perhaps the comfort that Guglielma provided in life and after death is why, when asked who taught her that Guglielma was the Holy Spirit, the Humiliati nun Giacoma answered that the belief “proceeded from her heart and not from any person.”Footnote 99 Similarly, the poor woman, Taria, tried to avoid affirming or denying anything in her testimony but said, “She certainly would have liked that Guglielma was the Holy Spirit.”Footnote 100 It is also probably not a coincidence that an alternative name for the Holy Spirit is the Paraclete, which can mean Comforter or Counsellor, and a few devotees likely named their children Paraclito in honor of Guglielma.Footnote 101
Because of their shared devotion to Guglielma, the devotees also considered themselves a family. The devotee, Francesco da Garbagnate, explicitly referred to their congregation as “the whole family.”Footnote 102 The devotees had become a relatively small, close-knit group by 1300; though one witness mentioned 129 women and men attending a celebration at Chiaravalle in Guglielma’s honor, the records only name seventy-one devotees, including thirty-eight women and thirty-three men, a third of which came from just four families, and eight devotees were sisters a Biassono, including Andrea Saramita’s sister, mother, and daughter.Footnote 103 The devotees repeatedly discussed holding frequent banquets and luncheons at their homes.Footnote 104 Because the devotees, though a small congregation, were not all related or from the same neighborhood, the inquisitors asked “why ser Danisio Cotta gathered with persons [at a particular luncheon] with whom he had no affinity, relation, or closeness.”Footnote 105 He responded, “Guglielma, a few days before her death, said … that [the devotees] were supposed to stay together, love, and honor each other.”Footnote 106 He then proceeded to explain, as previously mentioned, how speaking with Guglielma had always given him comfort to justify why he was one of her devotees.
Guglielma’s instruction to her devotees to love one another contrasts with how a rivalry between the Visconti and the Della Torre was disturbing Milan when she arrived and long after she died. In 1259, after Martino della Torre, the leader of the populares dominated by trade guilds, became the signore of Milan, he banished the rival Visconti family, which the nobility, merchants, and other wealthy elite supported. In 1262, after a double election in which the fractured cathedral chapter selected rival archbishops, Pope Urban IV rejected both candidates, including Martino’s brother Raimondo, in favor of Ottone Visconti, whom Martino denied entry into the city. As a result, the pope placed Milan under an interdict, but subsequent popes lifted the interdict twice and then reimposed it. Ottone only managed to end his exile in January 1277 after defeating the forces of the Delle Torre in the Battle of Desio. Ottone exiled the Delle Torre and dominated the city. By the time he died in 1295, his great-grandnephew, Matteo Visconti, had become the signore of Milan and dominated other Lombard cities until the Delle Torre exiled him in 1302 and again after he regained power in 1311 and ejected the Delle Torre.Footnote 107
Despite how this rivalry repeatedly agitated Milan, the congregation during and after Guglielma’s lifetime attracted devotees from both factions.Footnote 108 In addition to Maifreda, Galeazzo, one of Matteo’s sons, was a devotee.Footnote 109 Other supporters of the Visconti included Gaspare da Garbagnate and nine family members, Albertone da Novate, and Beltramo Malconzato, as well as at least four members of his family and household.Footnote 110 Several devotees, such as Giovanni Perusio and his wife Allegranza, Bellacara dei Carentani, whose late father Ruggero Damiani had openly opposed the Visconti, and Felicino, her son with her devotee husband Bonadeo, supported the Della Torre.Footnote 111 The location of Guglielma’s tomb at Chiaravalle, which drew lay patrons and monks from both sides, perhaps reinforced the congregation’s ability to attract support from across factional divides.Footnote 112 Guglielma’s tomb there became the center point of three annual feasts, which the devotees celebrated in her honor: her nativity on Pentecost, her death on St. Bartholomew’s Day (August 24), and the translation of her body from San Pietro all’Orto to Chiaravalle in late October.Footnote 113 On these days, many made the two-hour track to Chiaravalle to visit her tomb and eat food provided by the abbot and wealthy devotees.Footnote 114 Thus, just as medieval Italian penitents and penitential groups often had a peacemaking role, adherence to Guglielma helped to reconcile political rivals in a new family.Footnote 115 Much as Bynum as illustrated how religious women stressed continuity between their lives as women and their religious lives, so did the devotees focus on elements of continuity between Guglielma’s life as a holy woman, such as bringing together politically opposed devotees into her family, and her role as the Holy Spirit incarnate leading non-Christians to conversion after her second coming initiated the new age.
IV. The Beginning of a New Age
The Children of the Holy Spirit had planned two Masses to mark the transition between the current age and the new age in liturgical splendor. According to fifteen-year-old Franceschino Malconzato, “[He] first was to celebrate Mass at the tomb of Guglielma, that is the Holy Spirit, and afterwards Sr. Maifreda was solemnly to celebrate Mass in that same place, and then afterward Sr. Maifreda was solemnly to preach in the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore di Milano [Milan’s co-cathedral].”Footnote 116 Several devotees gave similar testimonies, though only Ottorino da Garbagnate included that Maifreda would both celebrate Mass and preach in the co-cathedral.Footnote 117 In addition, in preparation for Guglielma’s return and these Masses, Andrea and wealthier devotees made significant expenditures on gilded vestments, shoes, a silver buckle, and other clothing for Guglielma to wear after her resurrection. They also commissioned liturgical vestments for the inaugural Masses, including three copes, four dalmatics, liturgical vessels, including a chalice and a thurible, a frontal cloth, and steps for the altar.Footnote 118 Thus, the planned inaugural masses by both a young man and a woman demonstrate how the devotees transcended gender roles and would mark the beginning of a new age, not with radical rupture, but with liturgical grandeur that attempted to match that of the Roman Church.Footnote 119
The devotees also foresaw an age of neither apostolic poverty nor equalitarianism. The devotees were predominantly elite Milanese. In addition to Maifreda, who came from the noble Pirovano family, ser Danisio Cotta was from a prominent noble family, as were Albertone da Novate and Sr. Agnese dei Montenari, and four other families belonged to one of Milan’s ruling political assemblies, the Motta and the Credenza. Footnote 120 Andrea was at least moderately wealthy based on his commissioning of liturgical vestments and receiving deposits from fellow devotees.Footnote 121 It is only possible to identify two low-status devotees: Bianca da Ceriano, a servant of the affluent Malconzati, and Taria dei Pontari, the poor, unmarried seamstress.Footnote 122 Though the founders of many medieval heretical and orthodox groups, such as the Waldensians and the Franciscans, renounced their wealth and status, this was not the case for the devotees. For example, while the Franciscan habit was a permanent sign of asceticism, the devotees wore brown sleeveless habits in imitation of Guglielma, according to Taria, who made seven habits for herself and six other women, only on her feast days.Footnote 123 When the devotee Giacomo da Ferno told the inquisitors that the same Taria would become a cardinal in the new age, the records continue, “but concerning this magister Giacomo held it as a great abomination.”Footnote 124 In contrast, Giacomo did not express such disgust when he denied that Guglielma, supposedly a Bohemian princess, was the Holy Spirit and Maifreda, a nun of noble origins, was the future pope. The thought of someone of Taria’s status becoming a cardinal most likely horrified him.Footnote 125 Though perhaps Taria, Bianca, and others thought differently, the notebooks provide little evidence that the devotees sought to level social differences.
In contrast to Taria’s lowly state, Guglielma’s reputed royal origins probably appealed to the high-status devotees. The monks of Chiaravalle and devotees likely drew on the hagiographical trope of hereditary royal holiness to promote Guglielma’s sanctity and possibly saw her as a fulfillment of a pseudo-Joachimite prophecy in which King Otaker II of Bohemia (Guglielma’s supposed nephew) would reconcile the pro-papal Guelfs and pro-imperial Ghibellines in Italy, just as her spiritual family reconciled political factions and she would bring together Christians and non-Christians in the new age.Footnote 126 Moreover, the focus on Guglielma’s tomb and Santa Maria Maggiore for the planned Masses indicates that the devotees believed that Milan would become both a new Jerusalem and a new Rome through Guglielma. Mirano mentioned that Andrea and Maifreda taught, “There is as much an indulgence for those going to Chiaravalle to the tomb of St. Guglielma as there is for those who go beyond the sea.”Footnote 127 Milan displacing Rome and Jerusalem echoes the Third Order Humiliati Bonvensin da la Riva’s De magnalibus urbis Mediolani from the 1280s, which described Milan as a spiritual and political second Rome.Footnote 128 Such a description no doubt enhanced the self-image of the Milanese elite.
By 1300, the center of the new age shifted from Milan to Rome without any suggestion of a violent transition. According to Franceschino Malconzato on August 13, “Andrea Saramita said to him, around the last Feast of the Nativity…, that Sr. Maifreda de Pirovano was supposed to sit in Rome and there baptize Jews and Saracens and other nations who are outside of the faith.”Footnote 129 His mother, Sibilla, concurred and remembered that Andrea began to say this about a year before.Footnote 130 The first Anno Sancto or Jubilee Year of 1300 plausibly inspired Andrea’s revised vision of the new age. During Christmas 1299, pilgrims descended upon Rome seeking a plenary indulgence, which Pope Boniface VIII confirmed with the proclamation of the first Jubilee Year on February 22, 1300.Footnote 131 Andrea himself explained that after Guglielma’s return, “The pope and the papacy of the Roman Church, … its authority, and the curia of cardinals was supposed to cease.”Footnote 132 The current pope losing his authority suggests that Pope Boniface VIII’s pontificate influenced the insistence that Maifreda would become pope in either Milan or Rome. According to the priest Mirano, Andrea and perhaps others said, “The present pope is able neither to absolve nor to condemn, because he was not justly created.”Footnote 133 This transition to the new age would be nonviolent since Andrea explained, “The four gospels of Jesus Christ, which are now in the Roman Church, were supposed to keep their status, which they have now, until Sr. Maifreda is on the papal seat in Rome and in peace and quiet possession of the seat.”Footnote 134 Thus, the devotees, similar to how Joachim of Fiore’s writings did not predict the bloody obliteration of the Roman Church, expected that the current age would transition into the new one upon Guglielma’s return without the violent destruction of the present church.Footnote 135
Nevertheless, the Children of the Holy Spirit shared with Joachimism an expectation of persecution preceding the new age. The antichrist’s persecution of Christians in Joachimite apocalypticism was a prerequisite for the third status since Christ’s defeat of the antichrist would usher in his millennial reign.Footnote 136 Though the devotees lacked a precise antichrist figure even in Boniface VIII, the devotees believed they would suffer persecution and betrayal.Footnote 137 Gerardo da Novazzano told the inquisitors that he found written on a piece of paper in Andrea’s Psalter, “The Children of the Holy Spirit were dispersed and placed in prison.”Footnote 138 Yet, the devotees anticipated only limited persecutions. According to Mirano, Albertone da Novate claimed to have a vision at Guglielma’s tomb: “Andrea Saramita was tied by the brothers by hands and feet, and Guglielma released Andrea. And Albertone saw that the brothers wanted to capture Sr. Maifreda, and the angel defended her by drawing a bloodstained sword here and there.”Footnote 139 Though the inquisitors, or brothers, would persecute them, the devotees expected divine intervention to cut the persecution short.
Their fear of persecution and betrayal came from real experiences. In 1284, the Dominican Maifredo da Dovera initiated the first inquiry after Allegranza dei Perusi and Carebella dei Toscani told Belfiore da Nova what some devotees believed about Guglielma. She then informed her son Enrico, a Dominican friar, who notified Maifredo. He summoned and imposed penance on Andrea, Maifreda, Sr. Giacomo, Bellacara dei Carentani, and Andrea’s mother and sister, Sr. Riccadonna and Sr. Migliore, both of whom died before 1300.Footnote 140 While Allegranza and Carabella did not intend for any of this, some saw their loose tongues as a betrayal. A second inquiry in 1296 consisted only of the questioning of Gerardo, the Humiliati tertiary, before Pope Boniface VIII suspended the inquisitor, Tommaso da Como, for overstepping his authority in a different case.Footnote 141 But beyond the real experience of persecution, the devotees actively tried to avoid it. Andrea and the physician Beltramo da Ferno even made a futile attempt to halt the inquisition in 1300 by claiming Boniface VIII’s suspension of Br. Tommaso applied to all the inquisitors in Milan.Footnote 142 Fearing death at the stake as relapsed heretics, Maifreda and Andrea understandably warned devotees not to tell the inquisitors the truth.Footnote 143 In the end, the devotees neither sought after nor fantasized about persecution, probably because they believed that Guglielma’s return would peacefully usher in the new age.
Nevertheless, by late 1299, the devotees were likely cognizant that the inquisitors were settling their gaze on them. This awareness, combined with the Jubilee Year and doubts about Boniface VIII’s legitimacy, probably led them to establish a firmer date for Guglielma’s resurrection and ascension by Pentecost 1300 (May 29).Footnote 144 Perhaps in anticipation of both Guglielma’s imminent resurrection and expected persecution, on Easter 1300 (April 10) in an unidentified place, “Sr. Maifreda said Mass … and did everything concerning the Mass that other priests do; and Andrea read the gospel.”Footnote 145 The devotees had prepared a table as an altar with the necessary liturgical vessels, and Maifreda wore a chasuble. The Mass did not have an exclusively female hierarchy; two men had the most prominent liturgical roles after Maifreda: Andrea read the gospel and wore a dalmatic as a deacon, and Albertone da Novate read the epistle as a subdeacon. In addition, two or three Humiliati nuns also served as deacons, and at least four other elite men, including Franceschino Malconzato, wore a dalmatic, and Felicino Carentano, served at the altar. All the women at the altar were nuns, while all the men were laity. Besides Francheschino’s servant Bianca, all eight people named as attending the Mass came from an affluent background. Taria, the supposed future cardinal, was noticeably absent and later claimed to have known nothing about it.Footnote 146 The Mass was a foretaste of the new age: former enemies, partisans of the Della Torre and the Visconti, worshipping Guglielma in a splendor that discarded specific gender roles but was still in continuity with Milan’s social status quo.
The devotees’ heightened confidence that the end was near was proven correct, though not in the way they had hoped. On April 18, eight days after the Mass, the inquisitors interrogated Maifreda for the first time.Footnote 147 Possibly because Guglielma had failed to appear at Pentecost, Andrea, on August 16, told the inquisitors that Guglielma had already risen from the dead and had long appeared to the devotees, including to Maifreda and his late mother Riccadonna, and sometimes was in her tomb and at other times went elsewhere.Footnote 148 In less than a month, Guglielma’s remains, along with Andrea, Sr. Giacoma, and probably the relapsed Bellacara, were turned to ashes, and the devotees’ spiritual dreams went up in smoke with them, though Maifreda possibly survived until Matteo Visconti’s fall from power in 1302 removed impediments to her execution.Footnote 149
V. Conclusions
Caroline Walker Bynum once remarked, “Thirteenth-century heretical groups such as the Guglielmites in Italy, who tried to set up a female church may, as heresies, have been male creations.”Footnote 150 Scholars who study Guglielma’s devotees more in-depth would certainly disagree that the beliefs and practices of Guglielma’s devotees were entirely male creations, but their focus on gender role reversals assumes that the devotees built off the gender roles embraced by the male clergy who persecuted them. However, the lack of gender inversion does not entail that women’s roles in the Children of the Holy Spirit were any less important. Rather, by embracing the religiosity of women, the devotees transcended gender roles in practice and avoided the gender binaries in their anticipated church hierarchy. This is seen in how Maifreda and Andrea co-led the devotees and in how both men and women participated in the Mass to inaugurate the new age. In turn, their spiritual dreams saw in Guglielma not so much a co-redeemer with Christ but a comforter whose memory attracted devotees from both of Milan’s political rival factions and who offered the hope of reconciling Christians and non-Christians in the coming age.
Rejecting the male clerical emphasis on rupture, the Children of the Holy Spirit envisioned continuation from the present age into the new age. There would be a church hierarchy bedecked in gilded liturgical vestments, but the hierarchy would have a nun at the apex, though one from an established family. The old factional politics would give way to a new family of Milanese elite working together either in Milan, the new spiritual home of Christendom, or in Rome. Their vision of the future more or less substituted one church hierarchy with another. Yet, while the devotees’ preservation of the social hierarchy suggests that their spiritual dreams appealed primarily to elite women and men, the Children of the Holy Spirit conceivably offered more to women than either orthodox Catholicism or most other medieval heretical movements did, because women’s religiosity profoundly shaped the devotees’ vision of who Guglielma was and their dreams of the anticipated Age of the Holy Spirit.
Acknowledgments
I am thankful to the two anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful suggestions and comments.
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