Angela Merici was born circa 1474 in Desenzano del Garda, a small town in the province of Brescia, to an impoverished family of the lower nobility. Drawn to a spiritual life of prayer and penitence from early childhood, Angela became a tertiary of the Franciscan order in her twenties, pursuing a spiritual life while remaining out in the world. In 1516 Angela moved to Brescia, where she established her reputation as a spiritual leader and became a religious focal point for the citizens. She died there in 1540. The name of Angela Merici is known in particular in connection with...

Angela Merici’s religious experience and the historical significance of the Company of St. Ursula should be viewed within the context of late medieval female religiosity. From the twelfth to the sixteenth century a significant number of laywomen, called pinzochere, tertiaries, recluses, beguines, and beatas, followed a religious life outside the convent, either in their own homes or in small, informal communities. They pursued a religiosity based on penitential asceticism, charity, poverty, chastity, and mysticism, eschewing male clerical authority. This kind of religious life represented a cultural possibility available in many parts of Europe (Mediterranean Europe, the Low Countries, the Rhineland,...

The aim of this chapter is to examine how the figure of the Ursuline proposed in Angela’s rule fit within Brescian society. The first part investigates Ursuline identity and behavior vis-à-vis contemporary ideals regarding women and points out Angela’s originality in the use of certain gender assumptions concerning femininity. Although Angela employed some mainstream ideals regarding the construction of “womanhood” (such as modesty and virginity), the significance she gave them actually empowered women. Furthermore, the emerging female ideal—a virgin living in the world without protection—anticipated the lay single woman. It is for these reasons that the company was...

As we have seen, the form of life proposed by Angela’s company reflected the kind of association practiced by the beguines, pinzochere, and tertiaries. This chapter will analyze in-depth the similarities between Angela Merici and late medieval spiritual women by examining their relationship with God and with the sacred in general. Angela’s rule represents a very useful document for the study of the characteristics of female religiosity and its significance for women’s relationship with society. In many respects Angela presented the Ursulines with a model of holy life that reflected the spiritual experience and active social roles of medieval mystic...

This chapter examines Merici’s spirituality amid some significant spiritual themes that characterized the period before the Council of Trent (1545–63). The season of Angela’s religious work knew a host of spiritual currents and manifestations. It saw new forms of religious perfection, millenarian expectations, campaigns for church reform, and the spread of Protestant ideas. As historians have pointed out, the 1520s and 1530s in particular were a time of religious “experiments,” when new forms of individual perfection and projects for the reform of the church’s institutions were discussed in many spiritual circles.¹ While reform of the existing religious orders, with...

This chapter seeks to establish a connection between spiritual models and the cultural context of Renaissance Italy. The stress that Angela Merici and contemporaneous writers of rules and ascetic manuals placed on inner spirituality can be discussed in relation to Renaissance notions of the individual. The perception that societies have of the “self ” changes over time, and it has been made the subject of fruitful historical inquiries. The concept of the self in Angela’s times was inherited from the Middle Ages. Increasingly, the self was perceived as unique, with a complex interiority, and as the agent of its own...