“In The End, God Helped Me Defeat Myself”: Autobiographical Writings by Camilla Battista da Varano¹

Abstract

Camilla Battista da Varano (1458–1524), a mystic and Franciscan nun, spent most of her life in Camerino in east-central Italy. Now a saint—since 17 October 2010—she composed two autobiographical treatises across a ten-year period mid-way through a literary career that spanned the end of the fifteenth and the early part of the sixteenth centuries. In one, La vita spirituale (My spiritual life, 1491), she delivered a complete spiritual life story, tracing her religious devotion from the ages of eight to thirty-three. She described her relationship with a number of men, including her father and several clerics who—to one degree or another—inspired and guided her devotional life. By the time she wrote, she had been a professed Franciscan nun for seven years. She presented herself at that point as one who had undergone visionary, mystical experiences and as a woman who had both benefitted and suffered under the control of men like her father and her spiritual directors. In the other, Istruzioni al discepolo (Instructions to a disciple, 1501), she told the story of her affectionate relationship with a male disciple she was directing spiritually but used a literary conceit to hide her own identity. She wrote about the spiritual director the male disciple loved and admired in the third person, apparently in a self-deprecating manner inspired by humility but thinly veiling her obvious self-confidence. In these texts, and in other of her devotional treatises, she claimed the ability to provide spiritual direction of her own and wrote in bold imagery, creatively manipulating scripture at times. She exercised a do-it-yourself approach to discernment of God’s will and even to the process of confession. She criticized inattentive spiritual directors and asserted that both her visions and the impetus for her devotional writings came directly, unmediated, from God. But Camilla also exhibited deferential attitudes and strong connections to traditional Franciscan theology while including female authors in that tradition she apparently admired, like Caterina da Bologna (1413–1463). She also wrote at times with vivid expressions of obedience to the variety of men who held some authority over her. She was, apparently, not an individual easily understood through the standard images usually associated with late medieval and early modern women. A fuller portrait of Camilla is emerging as scholars today seek to recover her original voice.

One Friday evening I was busy until the eighth hour of the night, when I was allowed by my lord father to go to bed. And, since it was very late and there was much to read, and all the others were in bed, I was strongly tempted to leave [the book] aside for that evening and not to exercise my usual devotion. More than four times I deliberated whether or not to do it. In the end, God helped me defeat myself, and I made my usual devotion.

(MSC² 6v-7r)2

Camilla Battista da Varano (1458–1524) wrote those four sentences at the age of thirty-three, recalling an episode when she was eight years old, and placed them near the beginning of one of her autobiographical compositions The spiritual life (La vita spirituale).3 These few lines hint at the richly complex self-image, religious commitments, and literary prowess Camilla revealed in that text and in another biographical piece, Instructions to a disciple (Istruzioni ad un discepolo). Her complexity makes it impossible to define her as a simple exemplar of the terms usually associated with late medieval and early modern religious women. There is, of course, an enormous literature on the religious life of women in that era, and examination of just the principle points in the historical debate would provide material for a substantial essay of its own. Lucetta Scaraffia and Gabriella Zarri provided a critical contribution to this literature when they reflected on a central issue in feminist thought: whether Christianity was principally an institution responsible for the repression of women in western society or was a sphere in which women could participate in culture and gain power. They indicated that three main answers had been advanced: (1) the feminist “yes” to the latter characterization that was combined with a call to return to this ancient practice, (2) the polemical attack blaming clerical persons and practices for the repression, and (3) the source based approach to the lives of religious women that has largely identified inconsistencies in either the clerical repression, the powerful female participation, or both (Scaraffia and Zarri 1994, v–xvi). This essay provides, obviously, a contribution to approach number three. Numerous other overviews of the broad topic Scaraffia and Zarri were addressing are available (McNamara 1996; Ranft 1996; Evangelisti 2007; Zarri 2007; Wiesner-Hanks 2009, pp. 149–81; Ross 2009; Schutte 2011, pp. 23–51).

Camilla composed the text entitled The spiritual life over the course of about two weeks in 1491, in approximately 18,000 words, tracing her religious devotion from the age of eight to the age of thirty-three. She wrote Instructions a decade later in response to a request she reported from one of the many priests who served as her confessor and spiritual director. These “instructions” were a practical guide to living the spiritual life in a monastery. Camilla utilized a thinly veiled third person conceit, adopting the role of a reporter describing the experiences of another struggling with the challenges of religious life that she apparently considered applicable. She designed both these narrations, therefore, as vehicles for delivery of her own experiences, but Camilla relayed little information about her family, her education, or her life before 1466. She was born on 9 April 1458, an illegitimate daughter in the noble family of the ruler of Camerino, Giulio Cesare da Varano (d. 9 October 1502). She lived in a rather dysfunctional and hyper-politicized patrilineal context. Her father was one of two potential heirs left standing after an inter-familial dispute, and then he—not to mention most of her half-brothers—were the victims of henchmen mobilized by Pope Alexander VI (r. 1492–1503) and his son Cesare Borgia (1475–1507) to carry out papal plans for the region known as the Marches where the town of Camerino stands. Camilla’s birth mother was a relatively obsure noblewoman known as Cecchina di Maestro Giacomo who later married Venanzio di Antonio de Malignis.4

Such violence and dysfunction notwithstanding, Camilla, like the other children at her father’s residence, received a remarkable courtly, humanistic education. Camilla demonstrated it with her facile use of patristic, scriptural, and vernacular literature. These and other details about her life must be gleaned from numerous biographical studies that almost uniformly extol her devotional heroism and mystical gifts (Pascucci 1680; Marini 1882; Aringoli 1928; Aringoli et al. 1943; Boccanera 1957; Papasogli 1959; Simoncini 1972; Luzi 1989; Lachance 1994). Giulio Cesare and a cast of remarkable women, among them Elisabetta Malatesta (1407–1477), Costanza da Varano (1426–1447), and Camilla’s step-mother, Giovanna Malatesta, created on a small scale in that palace setting what was done in grander fashion in Renaissance courts controlled by popes in Rome, by the Medici family in Florence, and by the Montefeltro family in nearby Urbino. They patronized artists, hired soldiers, provided alms to the poor and pilgrims, and heard petitions from ducal subjects (Lilii 1649–1653; Simoncini 1972; McGinn 2012, pp. 306–11).

Camilla provided a few memories of court activities in The spiritual life and a great deal more: a spiritual autobiography where details about life beyond the devotional, the sacramental, and the mystical may fit but are placed decidedly in the background. Camilla opened with her consideration of a sermon recommending sympathy with the suffering Christ when she was an eight-year old. She ended it by expressing a rather uncertain, even depressed, attitude: lamenting years of spiritual agitation over discernment of spirits and waiting for clerical assistance that never materialized. Unlike more typical spiritual autobiographies that trace a passage from abjection to redemption, Camilla composed an ending that reads like a last will and testament, praying for peace and for the mercy of God to be gained through Christ and the intervention of her deceased confessor. Camilla depicted herself between this beginning and end sometimes at the height of mystical revelation, and at others in the depths of anguished desperation. She constructed a self-portrait in the pages scattering assertions reminiscent of traditional notions of feminine dependence upon authoritative males amid bold claims of personal, spiritual, and devotional independence. Consideration of such self-definitions has driven some ongoing reconsideration of standard ways of thinking about Renaissance literature and the Renaissance itself (Greenblatt 1980; Martin (1997, 2004); Ross 2009, pp. 10–13). Camilla put the self-portrait she constructed in her spiritual autobiography into practical application in her text Instructions. There she used scripture, not to mention popular proverbs, Renaissance cultural concepts—like virtù—lines from liturgical rites, medieval philosophical notions, and references to the writings of church fathers, all to her rhetorical advantage. She used these to delineate tactics a religious person could use to avoid the temptations of the devil, and to live closer to God, while taking upon herself the role of spiritual director to her own confessor.

In these autobiographical texts, Camilla described her relationships with a number of men, including her father and several clerics. All of them affected her devotional life to one degree or another. One was Domenico da Leonessa (d. 1497), who served repeatedly as provincial minister of the observant Franciscans in the Marches. He delivered sermons that inspired Camilla as an eight year old, and was her confessor/spiritual director from 1490 through 1491. He asked Camilla to compose The spiritual life. A second was Francesco da Urbino, another preacher about whom relatively little is known. His sermons in 1479, especially one on the theme of the Annunciation—likely delivered in March of that year—spurred Camilla’s entry into the Franciscan order. Camilla’s decision was thwarted for a time by another male who looms large in her narratives, her father, Giulio Cesare. He actively opposed her 1479 decision for some two and half years, first with enticements to remain at home, and later with threats and virtual imprisonment, but without breaking her resolve (Bracci 2009, p. 18). A fourth was Pietro da Mogliano (d. 1490), another Franciscan preacher who served as Camilla’s confessor and spiritual director. He was, perhaps, the individual she described as knowing and understanding her best of all. A fifth was the man to whom Camilla addressed the Instructions, likely an Olivetan monk, Antonio da Segovia (d. 1533), who allegedly urged her to compose the text in 1501. The sixth and final male, of course, was Jesus himself. Camilla described extraordinary visions of him, including a mystical marriage, and related them in prose studded with scriptural allusions and stunning visual details. Camilla had, as will become obvious, complex and interesting relationships with them all.

1. The Spiritual Life

Camilla explained in The spiritual life how Domenico da Leonessa, one of the clerics who became her spiritual director, gave a sermon on the passion of Jesus that was central to her spiritual autobiography. Domenico led her by means of the sermon to make a devotional vow in 1466. It was he, she insisted, “and no one else,” who provided the “origin, beginning and foundation” of her spirituality (MSC² 5v).5 He recommended that everyone in the crowd shed a tear that Friday out of compassion for Jesus. But while Domenico may have provided some devotional inspiration, Camilla quickly took matters into her own hands and proceeded considerably beyond the levels of prayer and meditation recommended by the friar. She pictured the human scene of Jesus before Herod, and inserted herself as an active participant. While observing them, she begged “in her heart,” as she explained, for Christ to speak to her. When he did not, and neither did he respond to Herod, Camilla boldly inserted her personal reaction. “It seems that you yourself wish to die,” she said, adding, “excuse me, my Blessed Lord, but I do not understand you.” After she was a little older, she explained, she remembered Domenico’s words, amplifying his devotional recommendation. She vowed to desire the shedding of tears every Friday, far exceeding his call on the day of the sermon (MSC² 4v).6 She presented the sermonizing friar as inspired but herself as responding emotionally and devotionally. She even used language that suggested a conviction that any real tears emerging through the vow would be the gift of God and not the result of her own actions (MSC² 5r).7

Camilla credited both Domenico and another preacher, Francesco da Urbino, with critical intervention in her spiritual development. To Camilla, Francesco was divinely inspired, a “true trumpet of the Holy Spirit,” who had shaken her from complacency out of “the world of darkness into the true light” by “thundering and flashing” against her soul with messages about offenses given to God through sin. Camilla insisted that Francesco reinforced her contrition, and spurred her meditation on the passion. In the midst of this meditation, she said, she began to hear voices recommending that she “flee the world” rather than “simmer in [its] broth and … mud,” as she preferred. She understood the call to mean that she should flee by becoming a nun. She also reported eating either nothing at all on Fridays, or only a few mouthfuls of bread, while sleeping little out of respect for the passion of Christ, all due to the influence of Francesco (MSC² 9r-10v).8 She entered into correspondence with him, amazed at his apparent knowledge of her condition—or her “captivity,” as she put it—and recognized in him the words of God. She later explained that the intervention of these friars, and the spiritual consolations she received since deciding to enter religious life, put her at odds with another powerful male in her life, her father.

Camilla took the next major step in her spiritual life via entry into the Franciscan convent in Urbino in 1481. Camilla acted over and against the objection of her father, Giulio Cesare, when entering. In a fascinating passage at the beginning of the seventh chapter of her spiritual autobiography, Camilla compared herself to the Israelites suffering under the bondage of the Egyptians and their Pharaoh. She wrote in an ambiguous manner about this comparison, and about her relationship with her father. After he freed the Israelites from Pharoah, Camilla explained, God led them through the desert even though they were rebellious and inconsistently faithful. She described herself as similarly inconsistent and rebellious after being freed from a “Pharoah” who, given what had come before in the text, could perhaps have been understood to be Satan. But when led toward the religious life by God, she said, her “malicious nature,” one rooted in a “false and whorish soul,” refused assent to God’s plan, and made up excuses. “Who could extract me from father and his powerful hands,” she asked? It was impossible for her to imagine, she explained, that she could leave the hands that “held me so dearly … even if I desired it deeply.” Camilla thus seemed also to conflate her father and his power with Pharoah, an authority to be escaped in the interest of loving and serving God. In a tantalizing, but undeveloped point, she explained that she would withhold information about the kind and quality of promises she made in order to escape from her father (MSC² 11v-12r)9. Later in the text, she indicated that her father was fearful of “the scourge of God, [or] he would never have permitted me to enter religious life” (MSC² 25r).10 Whatever his reasons may have been, Camilla was clear about hers: she had been moved to independent action and rejection of the expressed wishes of her father, in part by the sermon on the Annunciation. She indicated her desire to feel the same spark of love that Mary felt at the moment she learned of God’s plan. Camilla took matters into her own hands, clearly having been swept up emotionally and spiritually into the Annunciation narrative. So, she made another vow, this time to the Virgin Mary: to remain immaculate until God “disposed of me otherwise” (MSC² 12r-v).11 Her understanding of God’s will definitively trumped the desires of her father.

In subsequent chapters, Camilla related spiritual anxieties over impure reception of the Eucharist, and over weak contrition for sin, but no greater anxiety than that concerning her choice about entering religious life. Amid this anxiety she once again chose her own path, and related a tale of cautious spiritual discernment. She had apparently little hesitation when initially rejecting the recommendation—if not to say insistence—by her spiritual advisor Francesco that she become a nun. She had considered him earlier to be the very mouthpiece of God, so this rejection is surprising. After resolving the confessional matters and receiving communion a week after Easter in that same year, 1479, Francesco said, according to Camilla, “Now sin no more. Go in peace.” She promptly headed home, but apparently he had a convent in mind. Soon thereafter, God sent voices “so clear and distinct” that she said, at times “[I] put my hands over my ears.” Her prayer was like a “battle,” she said, and she was in such “conflict,” wracked “between ‘yes’ and ‘no’” that she “broke into a sweat, physically, because of the great agony.” Once her “free will,” she explained, “rendered sentence against me” and she “chose to serve God,” she was “refreshed” like a “martyred body on a bed of roses and flowers … completely at peace with this decision” (MSC² 14r-15v)12. In relating the story, Camilla appears to have been asserting several interesting things. First, she claimed not just the initiative in rejecting the initial recommendations of a trusted spiritual advisor but also the independent power of spiritual discernment. She claimed receipt of directive, heavenly voices, plus the ability to distinguish between good ones and bad ones herself. She also seemed to be presenting herself rhetorically as a martyr while under emphasizing her earlier poor choice. She stepped beyond the martyr claim to liken herself even to Jesus as he anguished in the garden of Gethsemane.

In her Spiritual life, Camilla wrote with bold imagery about a remarkable array of spiritual and mystical experiences she underwent even before, but especially after, entry into the convent of clarisse (Poor Clares) in Urbino in 1481. By the time she wrote the text, she had been a professed Franciscan nun for seven years. Her visionary experiences included a visit from Clare, the founder of her order, plus direct conversations with Jesus and a mystical marriage to him. She described all these in vivid prose studded with scriptural allusions and dramatic visualization of both divine persons and scenes from gospel narratives.

Prior to her entry into the convent, Camilla compared herself to a prodigal son and an adulterous sinner that God blessed with recognition of the “abyss” of his mercy flowing from the “cataracts of heaven” (MSC² 15v-16r)13. She was immersed in this flood, she explained, and then released the reins on her heart, uniting it in love, “impetuously … furiously,” and wedding it, as she said, to her “sweetest spouse, blessed Jesus Christ” (MSC² 17r-v).14 Camilla challenged the idea that he should love her, a profound sinner, in the mystical conversation with Christ that followed, but only until he explained that he had forgiven her, and restored her to innocence by placing his own innocence within her (MSC² 18r-19r).15 She inventoried the results of his action. Christ had left with her three fragrant lilies: hatred of the world, true humility, and the desire to endure pain in imitation of him (MSC² 20v-21v).16 She expressed deep desire to see Christ on another occasion, while contemplating the Transfiguration. Then, using language indicating at least surprise—if not to say joking sarcasm—she related an apparent willingness in him to show her his back but not his face. “This Jesus Christ,” she said, “crosses me in everything.” But after considerable delay, she continued, he did appear, and in a dazzling garment “of whiteness not found in this world.” And after a detailed physical description, she concluded, “He was something marvelous.” Still, Camilla insisted, this gift and other graces that she received did not satisfy her. She had hoped for prudence and patience in this world and felt neither (MSC² 23r-24r).17 She was being tested, she said. Once in the convent at Urbino, she prayed, she explained, for a share in the impassioned suffering of Christ (MSC² 26v-27r).18 This was the beginning of a condition she described as following logically from her spiritual marriage with Jesus. It was a state of great joy, but one also of desperation. Jesus revealed to her in a vision some words that were written on his heart: “I love you Camilla.” She reacted with deep anxiety over the condition of her soul, given that she was the focus of such affection. Comprehending the depth of Christ’s love in comparison to her weakness and sinfulness, she could not bear to look at a crucifix. The big letters in his engraved expression of love became like a set of “poisoned darts,” she said, piercing her “to the heart” (MSC² 27r-v, 31v-32r).19

While Camilla experienced these heights of devotional love and depths of spiritual desolation, she apparently also longed for clerical guidance. But she had a particular sort of guidance in mind and was apparently unafraid to indicate when what was given did not measure up. Amid a long period of spiritual agitation as a new sister in the convent at Urbino, and before her 1484 return to Camerino, the clerical help she expected did not materialize. So she sought—and explained quite clearly that she received instead—the guidance of Jesus himself. She expressed agitation best described as self-doubt. Prayers, the good example of others, and divine graces, Camilla explained, were all pleasing, but since she considered herself unworthy of the gifts, she thirsted instead for the myrrh of Jesus’s passion. It was he who tended the “lily” of her desire to suffer evil, she explained, and “with … [his own] mental anguish he furrowed, bathed and watered” that flower (MSC² 28v).20 She independently found traditional devotional texts of some assistance, if her story about an early fourteenth century tract is true. She displayed considerable knowledge of the 1305 text Arbor vitae crucifixae Iesu (The tree of the crucified life of Jesus) by Ubertino da Casale Montferrato (1259-c. 1329), a follower of Peter John Olivi (1248–1298) (Casale Montferrato 1458). Both of them were key voices in the development of the ideology of Spiritual Franciscans (later known as the Observants), literal interpreters of the Rule of St Francis. Camilla quoted Ubertino in her Spiritual life and insisted that she found in her own monastery the secret supports for the spiritual life that he identified in Arbor vitae. She implied that the Holy Spirit used her consideration of the text to lead her into the desert of “secret pain [in] the heart of Jesus” (MSC² 26r-v).21 Camilla occasionally praised the recommendations of some clerics on traditional devotions, as she found them helpful, but after applying what look like enhanced techniques. A certain Fra Gregorio recommended rosary recitations for better imagination of events in the life of Christ. She found “many consolations” in the meditative practice, at least when she made the recitations last for three hours. She insisted that the meditations seemed highly realistic, as though she were “bodily present” to witness the words and actions of Mary and the baby Jesus, accompanying them on their travels and experiences (MSC² 22r-v).22

But Camilla indicated not just her independent search, and not just helpful clerical interventions, in the more remarkable passages about seeking and securing spiritual guidance. She sometimes apparently attempted to manipulate the clerics. Neither did she fail to assert herself when describing the director/devotee relationship, indicating her own intentions and demands. And neither did she fail to mention the failures and improvements she perceived in them. She told the tales of her devotional life and begged her reader and sometime spiritual advisor, Domenico, to weep over her disconsolation, “unless he had a heart of stone,” of course (MSC² 19r-20r).23 Clearly, Camilla wanted compassionate guidance. She also wanted steady, reliable direction on her own terms. She did not identify such steadiness in her relationship with Pietro da Mogliano, one of the principle characters in her story. After her tribulations were over and she had moved to the convent at Camerino in 1484, Camilla was delighted with Mogliano’s appointment as pastor and vicar of the monastery. He wanted to hear her confession, but she refused, she said, on a “whim” and indicated that she had no need to confess. She reconsidered after he left the convent and wrote to him, asking for pardon over what she called her “asininity.” Mogliano delayed his return in order to “lead” her “to a greater desire,” she explained, and it worked. She hated herself for her spiritual laziness, and she hoped that Mogliano would hate her in return. Here again, as in her relationship with her father, and in her time of spiritual disconsolation, she asserted that God intervened directly. “Since I wanted hatred from [Mogliano],” she explained, “God promised me that I would have love … [and] from that point on, he loved me with a greater holy and spiritual love than ever a spiritual daughter [has been loved] in this world” (MSC² 32v-33v).24

Camilla described another set of dramatic mystical experiences in the remainder of the text, beginning with her self-critical reflection on the human condition and the need for the grace of God transmitted through the crucified Christ. Of course she had been self-critical in the text before, hinting at the contemporary condition she perhaps planned to relate at the end. Quite early in this autobiography she complained of her laziness after entering the religious life, particularly regarding midnight recitation of the rosary. She said, among other things, that “now that I am a nun I don’t get up, and I do nothing good” (MSC² 8r).25 After her profession in 1483, she explained, she came to understand the deep debts human beings owe to God which can never be repaid. All the praises, prayers and devotions we can produce, she concluded, were nasty and foul. Only grace in meditation on the crucifixion, delivered “by his merciful hand” would “restrain her,” she explained, from evil (MSC² 38r).26 She longed for “escape from the prison of this body in order to be with Christ” (MSC² 39v).27 She made a general confession to Mogliano in September of 1484 after this recognition and related breathtaking mystical experiences, including a commission by Christ himself to write another of her spiritual treatises, The mental sufferings of Christ in his passion (I dolori mentali di Gesù nella sua passione).28 But she lamented her fall from this pedestal into a pit of spiritual despair. Her depression persisted from 1488 to 1490, the year in which her now-trusted spiritual advisor, Mogliano, died. Camilla wrote her Spiritual life in 1491, addressing it to Domenico da Leonessa, her new confessor, as she emerged from the despair. She told him and other potential readers to learn from her disastrous example before it was too late. She exhibited some serious literary and religious self-confidence in the process, and not just self-critical reflection, despite the negative feelings she described. She may have explained that now after becoming a nun she does “nothing good,” but she also delivered withering criticism of the author of a fifteen-part meditation on the passion: it was “written by someone,” she said, “who could not think” (MSC² 6r-v).29

Still, finally, Camilla ended her spiritual life story in despair. She apparently could not bear to celebrate solemn feast days, like Christmas and Easter, so she made her life “a continuous Good Friday” (MSC² 43r).30 She ended the text with a stern warning. “Even if one can speak with God and to God, to the Virgin Mary and with the angels and all the saints,” she said, “one can still fall miserably and into the ruin of many mortal sins just as I did.” Camilla seemed by this point to have had many more readers than just her spiritual director in mind. She urged them all to “learn from the experience of this unfortunate and unhappy soul which attained the high watermark of divine love and spiritual delight, but now has been sunken by a strong storm in a bottomless, infernal abyss” (MSC² 47r).31

2. Instructions to a Disciple

In her 1501 Instructions to a disciple (Istruzioni al discepolo), Camilla articulated some extended guidance on how to live a successful monastic life (C. Magl 219r-236r).32 She wrote it while apparently utilizing the literary deceit of a religious woman composing a devotional story at the request of a confessor or spiritual director, one who was to keep the whole matter secret. The confesor and director in Camilla’s case had long been considered a Franciscan friar, Giovanni Pilii da Fano, provincial minister for the Observant branch in the Marches of Ancona. The identification has been challenged and remains uncertain (Thoman 2012, p. 167; and Zarri 2003, p. 148), but the editor of the new critical edition of the Istructions made a strong case that the recipient could have been Antonio da Segovia, who had served as Camilla’s confessor for some years (Varano 2017, pp. 155–57).33 Camilla wrote ostensibly about another sister who both she and the confessor held in high esteem. Camilla may have employed this deceit like others before her to avoid attributing mystical experiences and revelations from God to herself. She also wrote the text with obvious affection for her addressee, whom she described throughout as her spiritual son. To her, he was thus the object of direction, not just someone from whom she received confessional and spiritual advice, so their spiritual relationship was genuinely mutual. Camilla produced a remarkable narration in Istruzioni, emphasizing the practical importance of overcoming obstacles in the religious life, including some contemporary Roman religious authorities she firmly criticized, while bending expectations about gender roles for women and men engaged in relationships of spiritual friendship. She provided several recommendations for action to her own confessor in the process. She strongly encouraged him to imitate her, arguing at times that his priesthood—and the success of his service in that office—depended upon this imitation. She provided explicit instruction on how he might avoid certain sins. Camilla made these recommendations while expressing great love, apparently relying on their mutual esteem for one another, especially upon his esteem for her.

More than a decade ago a scholar stepped forward to challenge the simple, fundamentally repressive model for explaining the relationship between early modern women and their confessors, arguing that their relationships were more complex, nuanced, and reciprocal than the traditional view, where male confessor/directors exercised determined authority over obedient penitents (Bilinkoff 2005). Camilla provided evidence in Istruzioni that takes us another step altogether. Her approach may represent a complete reversal of both this basic—and gendered—notion of the power relationship between women and men in spiritual life, not to mention a reversal of the typical—and also gendered—expectations of the target audience for early modern devotional literature written by women. Such authors more typically addressed fellow female devotees. And perhaps most remarkable of all is that even considering the contents of the text, Camilla still seemed to presume that her confessor—and any others who might read the text—would be just fine with all of these innovations.

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century manuscript copyists and compilers, however, were quite another story. A Franciscan friar compiling earlier devotional writings named Bartolomeo Cimarelli (d. 1628) edited the text considerably. He eliminated some of the directorial language Camilla used in writing the text, as well as much of the intensity she delivered when comparing sins among practitioners of the religious life with those committed in other contexts. He may have been trying to create something more in line with changed sensibilities after the Council of Trent. But regardless, his version was considered authoritative until the end of the twentieth century. Still, the extent of his changes were not so substantial as those created by editors in the Oratorian order in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They positively transformed Istruzioni, all but eliminating the real author’s voice. They composed a saintly portrait of Camilla as an ideal female religious devotee out of a text that originally expressed something very different: the affectionate relationship between a female acting for all practical purposes as a spiritual director to her male disciple (Varano 2017, pp. 31–35).34

Camilla argued creatively that her correspondent must avoid a common pitfall affecting monks and nuns: hasty judgments about the character of brothers or sisters in religion. She recommended active pursuit of the opposite, that is, esteem for anything good found in fellow devotees. “Take the rose and leave the thorn,” she said, utilizing an Italian proverb. She told her spiritual son to find a way, as she had, to “draw the good from every single thing … given by God” (Varano 2017, p. 200; C. Magl 219v).35 Camilla insisted that murmuring about the shortcomings of fellow nuns and friars in one’s own monastery “loses graces” for those in religious life. She told this man whom she repeatedly professed to “love heartily” that he must not “act like a slave … [or] a whore” but rather “like a true son and a legitimate spouse,” refusing to be dragged down by temptation (Varano 2017, pp. 201, 203; C. Magl 220r-v).36 While delivering these exhortations to her reader, Camilla utilized related scriptural passages that might spring readily to mind, like the admonitions from the “Sermon on the Mount” regarding the speck in another’s eye.37 She was also apparently using other passages that might not come to mind quite so readily, like the assertion from Romans that “in everything God works for good,” plus the admonition of James against a religious who does not bridle his tongue.38

Camilla had practical advice on how to avoid the temptation to judgment and murmuring, and how instead to focus properly on day-to-day life. She explained that she had avoided temptations from a devil determined to “destroy fraternal love” through properly cautious conversations with prelates making canonical visitations of her monastery. She indicated that at the heart of one who complains about others is a troubled soul. “Make peace with yourself,” she said, “and you no longer have anyone to complain about.” (Varano 2017, p. 207; C. Magl, 222r).39 She recommended to her reader that when visitors come to review and evaluate religious life at the monastery, he should act like “that mother of yours,” who “never said a word,” adding that if he were to learn that a fellow religious had complained about him, he should “praise to [the] visitors the holy conversation of your brothers as [though they were] angels incarnate” (Varano 2017, pp. 208–9; C. Magl 222v).40 Instead of dwelling on such inconsequential things as the conversations of others, Camilla indicated that Giovanni should intentionally “sanctify every moment” of his communal life. She implied that it would be a rather simple thing to do, if he could “pray, read, chant the office, wash the bowls, sweep the house, and exert yourself in all works of charity,” out of love for God. (Varano 2017, pp. 214–15; C. Magl 224v).41 The benefit to be gained, she further explained, was to promote more frequent, even constant, thoughts about God, and to promote action with service and love of God as the object of all. The sanctifying intention—love of God—was clearly at least as important to Camilla as the action itself. The devotee, she insisted would, by this means, banish “unclean thoughts” even more quickly than through mortifications alone. Since the object of all action would be God, her reader would not become attached to creatures or be in danger of stealing love from God. She wanted Giovanni to keep the commandments, but she was more concerned that he have a “burning desire” to do penance, since “God considers only the heart.” Such properly intended and directed heat, Camilla added, would have another practical benefit: keeping away spiritual pests. She told him this was “because flies don’t go near a pot that boils, but they come quickly to one that is tepid” (Varano 2017, pp. 215–16; C. Magl 225r).42 The pesty “fly” she had in mind when using this proverb, of course, was the devil.

In the Instructions, Camilla made some remarkable, but sometimes contradictory, claims about herself—and about her devotional actions—to counteract the forces battling against Christians. She described victory over the “powerful captains” aligned against monks and nuns trying to be faithful in their religious communities as requiring a miracle. She explained that the captains were “the world, the flesh and the devil,” and only the intervention of God could permit one to endure in the religious life and be saved when enemies preemptively attack those committed to the goal of perseverence. (Varano 2017, p. 217; C. Magl 225r-v).43 Camilla infused a description of endurance against them with battle imagery. She clearly indicated that God’s grace and “angelic defense” facilitated the miracle, but just as firmly emphasized her own agency in the process. She had “triumphed over the flesh and the world,” she explained, for after having “jousted” with a “shining sword” against “both the one and the other,” God “made her victorious.” (Varano 2017, p. 218; C. Magl 225v-226r).44 Camilla followed these assertions with phrases completely rejecting the notion that she had any value before God. She insisted that there were two Trinities that real Christians must believe in, demonstrating surprising theological creativity. First, she discussed the “divine Trinity” of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, of course. But Camilla then added a second, most unholy one that must become an equal object of belief if a Christian were to achieve perfection. The second Trinity was a three-part self-denigration. There is “[an]other trinity,” she insisted, “that is, that [I am] nothing other than a nothing, complete foolishness, and hateful to God.” It was only “spirtual ignoramuses,” she continued, who did not know, adore, and believe in this second Trinity (Varano 2017, pp. 222–23; C. Magl 227v).45 But Camilla did not, apparently, feel constrained to silence her own spiritual advice due to such realizations. And neither did she seem to consider knowledge of her status as “hateful” to God as anything but a step toward perfection. She apparently did not consider herself useless to her reader at all, and further evidence lies just a few pages later in the text. There, she asserted that imitation of her own actions by this priest and “spiritual son” was more than desirable: it was necessary for success in his priestly vocation. She told him to acknowledge it all in prayer to God. Here, she said, was the “infallible [way of] life along which your mother walks and has walked.” She explained that he needed to beg God, for the “revelation” he desired, instructing him to say “I cannot be perfect without it,” for that quality in turn was “necessary for my dignity and excellence as a priest” (Varano 2017, pp. 225–26; C. Magl 229r).46 Obviously, Camilla was making a remarkable claim about herself imbedded in this advice to a contemporary clerical follower. He was to follow her path, just as she had followed the path laid out by Mogliano and other spiritual advisors she had trusted.

Camilla felt sufficient spiritual confidence, it seems, to include criticism of ecclesiastical superiors even beyond the spiritual directors she corrected in stories from The spiritual life. Here, in the Instructions, she took on other religious figures she apparently believed failed to live up to proper ideals of humility and devotion. The rightly devout person in religious life had well-ordered affections, unattached to any particular created thing. For Camilla, that meant the Christian life must be marked by profound charity. Or, as she put it to her follower in the final section of the Instructions, “be generous to the poor and your neighbors, [but] stingy with yourself.” She elaborated by suggesting that the kindness, generosity, and liberality “without measure” exhibited by God ought to be emulated by his followers. But “the servant and the one who grants dispensations,” she continued, “who came into the world naked and very, very soon will return the same way … show themselves [to be] most avaricious, stingy, impious and cruel to a neighbor and brother” (Varano 2017, p. 238; C. Magl 233r-v).47 She used the word dispensatore, the “dispenser” of favors or graces. She seems certainly to have had in mind religious superiors with authority over other “brothers” in the community that her follower represented. Given that the word dispensatore has secondary meanings implying a legal and/or administrative functionary, even sometimes a functionary in financial and treasury administration, it seems reasonable that she may also have been referring to granters of ecclesiastical dispensations more broadly conceived. If so, her allusion would be to prelates operating under episcopal and perhaps papal authority, granting benefits applied through the so-called “treasury of merits.” In this case, coming from a woman, and well before what is sometimes called the Lutheran “revolution,” hers would be a remarkable criticism, indeed.

3. Significance

Camilla’s voice has apparently been significant and influential from the moment of her speaking right into the twenty-first century. The most interesting and significant twist in the story of her influence for historians, however, may lie in the appropriation and manipulation of her voice. This appropriation and manipulation took place in between the immediate impact she had upon contemporaries she lived with and advised on the one hand, and her longer run impact as exemplified by her recent canonization, on the other. It occurred in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, at the height of the so-called “Counter-reformation.”48 And we owe, curiously enough, a great deal of the popularity and transmission of Camilla’s written works to males in a Tridentine-era religious order—the Theatines—not often associated with valuing or encouraging female spiritual discourse. They picked up one of her treatises, I dolori mentali di Gesù nella sua passione (The mental sufferings of Christ in his passion), that some commentators consider a continuation of the Instructions to a disciple. Theatine editors not only picked it up, but they also published it, sometimes as the work of another Theatine. The other writer was perhaps the best known of contemporary devotional authors, Lorenzo Scupoli (1530–1610). His principal work, Il combattimento spirituale (The spiritual combat), was a certifiable early modern bestseller (Hudon 1996a, pp. 16–62; Mas 1992).

Perhaps even more pertinent for the understanding of Camilla’s autobiographical works, however, are editorial changes made in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the Istruzioni. Cimarelli, the seventeenth-century Franciscan editor considered to have introduced mainly non-substantive changes, may be worth another look. While his revisions may not have been heavy, he removed some language highlighting Camilla’s directorial action with her reader while emphasizing in other places the leadership of spiritual fathers. He discounted Camilla’s mystical claims and allusions at times. He also tuned down both the imagery of spiritual battle that was so central to her other writings, as well as the urgeny of her appeal for the reinvigoration of charitable ideals among key ecclesiastical persons—perhaps even dispensation granters—that were key points among the myriad reform voices emering in her lifetime. Her expressions of endearment for her reader, which she delivered always with male nouns and adjectives like mio caro (my dear) or amico caro (dear friend), Cimarelli rendered as a generic “devout soul” (anima divota). He removed much of her colorful language, most notably her admonitions to her directee concerning service to God. She warned him in earthy language to perform service not like a “whore” who expected a prize or benefit, but rather like a “legitimate son” and “loving spouse.” She applied the language of mystical marriage to him as another potential spouse of Christ and did so repeatedly, using this formulation twice in the space of two pages in the Florentine manuscript. Of course, the phrasing she used in this section—recommending that he act like a “legitimate” son, for instance—held special significance given Camilla’s own birth status. Cimarelly edited out most of this, including all the uses of the word “whore” (meretrice), while prefering elimination of all references to a male addressee. The result was a book of advice from a perfectly devout woman given to a generic, genderless other devotee. Thus, possible sexual innuendo—not to mention the real story of the spiritual, well-wishing desires of a spiritual mother for her beloved spiritual son—was effectively neutralized. Cimarelli made other changes where his rationale seems difficult to determine. Toward the end of the text, for instance, he removed the reference to “the poor” when Camilla identified those that her spiritual son and others—probably fellow Franciscans—should serve with generosity while being stingy with themselves. This is especially puzzling given the fact that Cimarelli was himself a Franciscan and presumably imbued with the same drive for extreme devotion to evangelical poverty that motivated the founder of the order—the same drive that was exhibited by both Camilla and the other Franciscan writers Cimarelli celebrated in the volume he was editing. His work, significant as it was, only set the stage for Oratorian editions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the text was fully trasformed into one about her, not written by her. This editorial work discounted Camilla’s authorial and directorial agency. Camilla’s unique voice was submerged for a time.

Despite editorial appropriations and manipulations, if these texts are illustrative of Camilla’s genuine self-image, numerous interesting conclusions can be drawn, and further questions can be considered. Camilla surely wanted to be remembered as a woman of considerable, but hardly unlimited, independence. She had both benefitted from and suffered under the control of men like her father and her spiritual directors, after all. But she claimed the ability to provide spiritual direction on her own in these texts and in other devotional treatises, writing in bold imagery revealing creative, surprising ways of thinking about the relationship between a devotee and her God. She presented herself as the practitioner of a do-it-yourself approach to discernment of God’s will and, at times, even to the process of confession. She criticized inattentive spiritual directors and asserted that both her visions and the impetus for her devotional writings came directly, unmediated, from God. She seemed to view all males with whom she had any sort of relationship—even Jesus—always at an angle, never accepting them fully, and always with mixed feelings, if not an outright mixture of love and hate. Perhaps the best example can be found in Camilla’s description of her relationship with her biological father in their conflict over her monastic vocation. But what exactly was she suggesting such a father should do, especially while the head of a noble family in a largely patriarchal society, as his daughter began to assert herself as a spiritual mother?

Still, Camilla also exhibited self-deprecating attitudes at times, including deference we associate with the subservience stereotypically identified in pre-modern women. She wrote to express her own obedience, on occasion, to the variety of men who held some authority over her, and by implication, she recommended similar attitudes in others. Such attitudes sometimes involved what appear to be strong ties to traditional Franciscan, Pauline, and Augustinian theology, plus its contemporary offshoots.49 Camilla delivered many of her more emphatic traditional theological statements in the Instructions, composed in the year that her father was excommunicated and the year before his death as little more than a pawn in papal power politics. It seems undeniable that agony and frustration played a role in driving Camilla toward what she considered “true” devotion. Camilla surely also exhibited self-discipline and devotional determination to, as she said, “defeat herself,” or at least her own reticence for prayer.

Just as surely, however, she in no way defeated herself or undermined her own significance. She was clearly engaged, from the very beginning of her spiritual life, in a process of active negotiation with authoritative males for spaces and activities—for public, semi-public, and private devotions—that suited her understanding of her personal vocation and her relationship with God. She never used the word “negotiation” to describe these interactions, but it seems clear that such was occuring based upon her description of give-and-take with Mogliano over commonplace events like a confession and her description of the long battle with her father over defiance of his will concerning a life decision like religious vocation. In the process, Camilla exhibited determined agency: hammering out a role in which she both received and gave advice on her own terms, reflecting a curious, complicated mixture of independence and subordination. She seemed to feel empowered to recommend that same mixture of apparently contradictory qualities to those she directed through her writings. She addressed an audience that included her own convent sisters and male practitioners of the religious life living far beyond the confines of her cloister. The latter group, she seemed to assume, had identical goals to her own: living a more perfect life and achieving—so far as it was possible—union with God through prayer and meditation. For her, whether a spiritual director was female or male seems to have been largely beside the point. To suggest that Camilla challenged “gender expectations” in her society may be a statement more about the way she is remembered than about the way she was. There is no evidence that she challenged anything she would have defined as “gender expectations” deliberately or consciously. Her motivation seems throughout to have been to fully express her devotion and spirituality, not to bend or break what we call gender expectations. For Camilla, the point was always true spiritual guidance, true spiritual devotion, true religious life, which could apparently be generated, practiced, and lived only by a rightly devout person. Nonetheless, her actions—as she described them—force reconsideration of any gendered boundaries historians may consider to have effectively limited spiritual messages composed in early modern Europe. And our notions of how gender expectations affected real women in that era must be complex enough to explain the actions and words of Camilla to be useful in comprehending early modern society.

It may be that, for a time, seventeenth-century editors defeated Camilla by manipulating her work, by attributing portions of it to male authors, and by temporarily submerging her voice. But the very fact that male scholars and devotional writers in multiple contemporary religious orders included her works in editions of important spiritual writings and sometimes even claimed them as works of their own members, indicates that they acknowledged her authority and the value of her message. Her canonization in 2010, of course, shows that neither the early modern manipulation, nor the text appropriations, nor any authorial submersion could last. Indeed, the canonization process always demonstrates powerful local and international support for the religio-cultural ideals the new saint exhibits (Copeland 2016; Finucane 2011; Duffin 2009; Ditchfield 2007; Woodward 1990; Burke 1984). In Camilla’s case, the early following she gained among popular devotees in Italy beginning in the mid-sixteenth century expanded in the seventeeth and eighteenth, even to Italian immigrant communities in the United States. Besides the life memorialized by these devotees and that she constructed in these texts, what can be known about Camilla’s actual life? A thorough reconsideration of all her spiritual writings, and of the circumstances of her daily life, especially her interaction with spiritual advisors and confessors, has been underway for some time. The reconsideration should reveal more about Camilla’s fascinating voice.50 But some brave scholars have gone so far as to suggest that texts by early modern religious women—including the autobiographical works of Camilla—represent a sort of religious Renaissance because of their learned content and their obvious purpose of inspiring and directing others, both male and female, in enhanced religious devotion. Camilla was just one among many who served as spiritual guides to other religious women and to religious men (McGinn 2012, pp. 292–328; Zarri 2007; Bilinkoff 2005; Zarri 1990). But it also seems clear that her story of negotiating a space for herself over and against males attempting to control her, even as she wrote frequently in deferential language and powerfully asserted her own authority to provide spiritual direction to some clerical males, has another possible significance. Her autobiographical writings can be used, like other documentation exposing genuine female agency, for rethinking the traditional narrative of the marginalization of late medieval religious women. We must indeed, as Sherri Franks Johnson recently argued, reconsider how we discuss the struggles between religious women and the leaders of their orders, reaching beyond legislative documentation. She and others have found that convents were complex institutions where individuals on the inside and the outside competed for control, authority, and independence, doing so through the spoken and written word (Johnson 2014, pp. 2–18; Tylus 2009; Strocchia 2002). Only fully contextualized reconsideration of these spaces—and of the voices used inside, even projecting outside, those spaces—shall permit us to see women in religious life as they were and not just as they were supposed to have been. Camilla’s experiences and surprising voice thus have a role in the continuing—and hotly contested—reassessment of both the Renaissance and the Reformation in early modern Europe.