Possible Lives by Frazier Alison Knowles;

Author:Frazier, Alison Knowles;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion/Christianity/General
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2011-12-01T16:00:00+00:00

Et sane Paulos et Antonios semper habens prae oculis, quamvis comitata, in solitudine perpetuo degebat.

And rightly having the Pauls and Anthonies always before her eyes, she lived in perpetual solitude (although accompanied).

—Paolo Olmi, O.E.S.A. (d. 1484), vita Magdalenae28

Giacomo’s vita Helenae utinensis represents an unusual choice of subject, for authors associated with the studia humanitatis paid relatively little attention to their contemporaries who strove after sanctity and still less to the subgroup of aspirants who happened to be married women.29 Elena of Udine (1395/96–April 23, 1458) may have been a predictable subject insofar as she belonged to the noble family de Valentinis: throughout the Middle Ages, vitae were rarely written about laypeople who were politically unimportant.30 But she was not a virgin, not a martyr, and not a nun. She had been married for three decades to Antonio Cavalcanti, a wealthy cloth merchant of Florentine extraction who made himself more dangerously prominent by his outspoken opposition to the Venetian takeover of his city.31 After Antonio’s death in September 1441, Elena was required by the terms of his will to take financial responsibility for their six children and to live with them in the family home.32 She gradually divested herself of this worldly duty and at a certain point began living in the house of her widowed sister Profeta, near the church and convent of Santa Lucia, which belonged to the Augustinian Hermits (Ordo Eremitarum Sancti Augustini, O.E.S.A.).33 Perhaps the prior of Santa Lucia, Antonio da Milano, was Elena’s confessor during these early years, as she adopted the life of a pinzochera: without formal affiliation to an order and without taking vows or living in strict claustration, the widow probably practiced chastity, voluntary poverty, frequent prayer, and asceticisms such as restricted eating and sleeping.34 Such pinzochere, the southern European equivalent of the Beguines, were familiar figures in the Quattrocento cities, living withdrawn but not solitary lives. From about 1449, a small group of women, all of elevated social class, and many her kin, joined Elena in her pious withdrawal.35

More than a decade after her husband’s death, Elena formalized her relationship to the Augustinian Hermits, so that she spent the last six years of her life as a mantellate, a member of the Hermits’ Third Order.36 The impetus for this decision, according to the earliest vita (discussed below), was a preaching tour by the otherwise unrecorded Angelo da Sancto Severino, O.E.S.A.37 Elena was the first woman in Udine to become an Augustinian tertiary, although others from her group seem to have followed her path about the same time.38 Now, as a mantellate, Elena may have increased her devout exercises, but they would also have been more closely monitored. The Dominican who is known to have been her confessor, Leonardo Mattei of Udine (d. 1469)—famous preacher and promoter of the sanctity of the thirteenth-century ascetic Benvenuta Boiani of Cividale—may have intervened in these last years to advise that Elena moderate her diet and discipline.39 Between home and church, she pursued her devotional life with a typically late-medieval mixture of affectivity and rationality.

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