Catherine of Siena
A dyer’s daughter of Siena and Dominican tertiary, whose letters to popes, cardinals and rulers pressed for peace in Italy, reform of the clergy and the return of the papacy from Avignon to Rome.
The chronology that Vida Scudder prefixed to her translation of the letters gives the outline of Catherine’s life: born at Siena on 25 March 1347, the youngest child of the dyer Jacopo Benincasa; clothed in the Dominican habit as a tertiary living at home in 1363 or 1364; sent by the Florentines to Avignon in 1376; died in April 1380, on the 30th by Scudder’s table (Catherine of Siena, Letters editor’s table of Catherine’s life).
Her letters are her own voice. To Gregory XI she wrote that he should be “manly” and “not timorous”, come to the seat of Peter, and reform the church by giving it good priests (Catherine of Siena, Letters To Gregory XI (“Be manly”)). See the Popes at Avignon; her part in the dispute that followed is told in the Great Western Schism.
In the timeline
- 1309 to 1377, estimated dateThe Popes at Avignon
After the election of a Gascon pope in 1305 the papal court settles at Avignon on the Rhône and stays for some seventy years. Petrarch calls it Babylon; Catherine of Siena urges Gregory XI to come home, and he returns to Rome in 1377.