medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (29. May) is also the feast day of:
Bona of Pisa (d. 1207). An exact contemporary of yesterday's Ubaldesca,
B. is another early lay saint from Pisa. According to B.'s Vita, she
was born in that city's Chinzica quarter; her father was a Pisan
merchant and her mother a woman from Corsica (then under Pisan control).
When she was three her father, who had gone to the Holy Land, abandoned
them permanently for another woman by whom he had children. In her
early teens B. undertook a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in order to find
him. Though she was unsuccessful in this regard, she found (as many
Pisans doubtless did) that she rather liked travel. And so, while
spending most of her life as a recluse at Pisa under the spiritual
direction of the Augustinian Canons of the church of St. Martin in
Chinzica, she undertook nine pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela and
made visits to the tombs of the Apostles at Rome. A trip to the
sanctuary of St. Michael on the Gargano Peninsula brought her to Apulia.
The Benedictine congregration founded by John of Matera had its
headquarters at the nearby monastery of Santa Maria di Pulsano; B. was
not only connected with this congregation's monastery of St. Michael
outside of Pisa but encouraged the establishment of a new Pulsanese
house near Pisa dedicated to the saint of Compostela, James the Greater.
B. was buried at St. Martin, where she remains today (her body has been
exhumed at least three times). Both the Augustinians and the Pulsanese
Benedictines furthered her cult (the A and B variants of her Vita
signify 'Augustinian' and 'Benedictine', respectively). By the late
twelfth century Pisa had a lay confraternity dedicated to her. She was
canonized in 1920. In 1962 John XXIII declared her the patron of
Italian travel hostesses.
The various versions of B.'s Vita are edited by Gabriele Zaccagnini in
his _La tradizione agiografica medievale di santa Bona da Pisa_ (Pisa:
GISEM - ETS, 2004). There's an English-language analysis of the
Augustinian version in Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff's _Body and Soul:
Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism (NY: Oxford Univ. Pr., 1994), pp.
167-71 and notes on p. 180 (but ignore P.'s erroneous year of death for
B., which arises from a slavish following of Vita A without
consideration of the latter's use of Pisan calendar style). The Pisan
archivist Maria Luisa Ceccarelli Lemut has a chapter on Bona in her
_Medioevo Pisano. Chiesa, famiglie, teritorio_ (Pisa: Pacini, 2005),
pp. 75-86.
Pisa's church of San Martino was rebuilt in 1587 but still shows some
aspects of its later medieval self (the post-Bona church erected in
1331). An illustrated, Italian-language account is here:
http://www.stilepisano.it/immagini/Pisa_Chiesa_di_San_Martino.htm
Some views:
http://www.stilepisano.it/immagini/images/sanmartino%20007_jpg.jpg
http://www.stilepisano.it/immagini/images/sanmartino%20024_jpg.jpg
And here's Bona:
http://www.stilepisano.it/immagini/images/sanmartino%20034_jpg.jpg
San Martino also houses a striking thirteenth-century painted crucifix
by Enrico di Tedice:
http://www.stilepisano.it/immagini/images/sanmartino%20012_jpg.jpg
http://www.stilepisano.it/immagini/images/sanmartino%20027_jpg.jpg
http://www.stilepisano.it/immagini/images/sanmartino%20026_jpg.jpg
Best,
John Dillon
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