396 BuoniCattolici
pared Christians to meet their Maker.^86 At Milan, the water used to wash
the body was occasionally mixed with wine, to recall the Eucharist as well as
baptism. It was perfectly proper to keep some of this mixture as a pious
keepsake, as Don Mirano dei Garbagnati, priest of San Fermo, explained
during the inquest into the cult of the pseudosaint Guglielma.^87 As prepara-
tion for burial, washing sufficed; embalming was rare or nonexistent. The
only embalming I know of was for Saint Agnese of Montepulciano in 1317.
Those preparing her body had to send all the way to Genoa to get the
balsam. But their mail order proved unnecessary. Agnese’s body proved mi-
raculously incorrupt.^88 An incorrupt body testified to holiness; rapid decay
suggested an evil life or a bad end. About the year 1322 , the Augustinian
preacher Filippo di Leonardo of Siena told of a beautiful woman whose
husband indulged her whims for provocative and beautiful clothing. She
became an occasion of sin for weak-willed men. When she died, in the mid-
dle of applying her makeup, we understand, her face immediately corrupted
and presented a stinking (puzza) mess. Shamed by this revelation of her evil
ways, her family buried her in a sealed coffin. Her serving maid let out the
truth, however, and the family had to deny it in public.^89
At least in the case of a cleric, the body was arrayed in the robe of his
order. Clerics were not only washed; their beards were shaved and their
tonsures renewed. Other members of religious orders, male or female, wore
their order’s habit. Occasionally laypeople received a religious habit on their
deathbed and so associated themselves with the suffrages of the religious
order.^90 Clerics wore the liturgical vestments proper to their rank: bishops
full pontificals, priests their chasuble, deacons a dalmatic, subdeacons a tuni-
cal, and so forth. Sicardo of Cremona, however, conceded that, for those
other than bishops and priests, a simple gown was enough in cases of pov-
erty.^91 From his clerical point of view, ordinary men and women all belonged
to a single order: the laity. So they should all go to the grave dressed alike:
in sackcloth—a sign of the repentance suitable to their state. Sicardo admit-
ted, a bit grudgingly, that the wealthy sometimes wrapped their dead in a
shroud and shod them with hose and sandals. He gave this extravagance a
religious gloss by suggesting that it was inspired by the burial shroud of
Christ.^92
- As Sicardo,Mitrale, 9. 50 , col. 427 , tells us.
87 .Atti inquisitoriali [contro i Guglielmiti], 2. 27 ,p. 180. - Raimondo of Capua,Legenda Beate Agnetis de Monte Policiano, 3. 2 , pp. 70 – 71 ; see the anthropologists
Metcalf and Huntington,Celebrations of Death, 193 – 97 , on embalming practices. - Siena, Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati,msI.v. 10 (earlyxivcent.), fols. 1 r– 2 v.
- See Louis Gougaud,Devotional and Ascetic Practices in the Middle Ages(London: Burns, Oates &
Washbourne, 1927 ), 131 – 45 ; clothing with a monastic habitad succurrendumis very old; the friars practiced
it, too, at least by the 1300 s. - Sicardo,Mitrale, 9. 50 , col. 427 ; councils repeated this legislation: e.g., Ravenna Council ( 1311 ), 2 ,
p. 452. - Sicardo,Mitrale, 9. 50 , col. 427. See alsoOrdo Senensis, 2. 93 , pp. 498 ; Reggio Stat. ( 1277 ), p. 47 ; and
Pisa Stat.ii( 1313 ), 3. 58 ,p. 350 , to the same effect.