«Ò scritte di mia mano in su l’Isola della Rocca». Literacy and culture of Catherine of Siena
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Abstract
The aim of this essay is to investigate both reading and writing Catherine of Siena’s literacy. The traditional and still persistent image – built by his first hagiographer, the Dominican Raymond of Capua – is that Catherine was entirely illiterate until God miraculously endowed her with some reading (but not writing) literacy. The evidence that Catherine of Siena was throroughly literate comes from a range of sources only partially examined by scholars until now. The first and foremost of these texts is an almost unknown Thomas Caffarini’s letter to Catherine written in 1374 about a philological problem on ps. 130.
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