Today is the feast of St. Catherine of Siena, the co-patron saint of Italy. The Renaissance was tough on women, Catherine’s older sister and younger sisters died in 1463 (she had 22 other siblings, although, at that point, who could tell who was alive or died or the neighbor’s cat.) Catherine’s father did what any other father would do – tried to make the teenage Catherine marry her sister’s widow.
It didn’t matter to anyone, save Catherine, that her brother-in-law was a filthy, lascivious old man. Catherine fasted until her father relented and let her enter a nunnery. While fasting, she, like our old pal Teresa of Avila, was pierced by God’s shaft of ‘pure love,‘, (is this what comes from anorexia in the Middle Ages?).
Though, supposedly illiterate, Catherine famously corresponded with the leading church figures (both men and women) of her day. In fact, Catherine is one of the few women Saints who are thought of, as holding doctorates. She is one of the church most famous bulimics, disgorging everything she ate for the next 17 years, except the Eucharist she received every day.
She, of course, is the patron saint of bulimics and anorexics, the sick (in general), nurses, firemen and sexual temptation (there is a connection between the two, but I’m not going there.)
As is always the case, when saints die, people clamor after their body parts. She is scattered over most of Italy; her head and one of her fingers are resting in Siena and a major part of her is beneath the main altar at Santa Maria Sopra Minerva Church in Rome.
And so it goes
The Haus of Dcaligari 