426 Epilogue
the gender ratio of the lay saints reinforces the masculine image of commu-
nal religiosity. The popular communal saints were men like Pietro Pettinaio,
Omobono of Cremona, and Ranieri of Pisa. The later thirteenth century
saw a slow but real gender shift in the spiritual life. The mendicants played
a central, if not always willing, role in this change. Admittedly, the female
saints who proliferated in the later 1200 s were not all mendicant prote ́ge ́es.
Saint Margherita of Cortona, who was initially drawn to the Franciscans,
spent her later years distancing herself from them. The reasons for this
change are unclear; perhaps she felt they were limiting her independence.
But on the whole, women found in the friars a support lacking in the secular
clergy and the city cappelle. Saint Oringa Cristiana got help from the Fran-
ciscans when she started her hermitage, and many of her miracles aided
Franciscans and Dominicans.^50
In the later 1200 s, the focus of women’s religious life moved from the
country to the city. The period saw the first large-scale urban competition
to the rural life of the Benedictine nuns. Mendicant patronage facilitated
this.^51 Female religious foundations during the communal period were nearly
all under mendicant patronage or affiliated with some mendicant-inspired
reform movement in the monastic orders.^52 Older houses of women had
links to aristocratic patrons and always remained outside communal piety.^53
The mid- 1200 s saw a boom in women’s foundations within the city walls. Of
the thirty-six known convents of women at Bologna in 1250 , only seven pre-
dated 1200 ; nineteen were mid-thirteenth-century creations. Never again
was Bologna to know such a large female religious establishment. From the
high of thirty-six houses in the 1200 s, women’s convents began a slow decline
until the 1500 s, when there were only twenty houses.^54 New foundations took
the Augustinian rather than Benedictine rule and huddled around the houses
of their mendicant patrons.^55 Most invisible to us are the countless new ‘‘mi-
croconvents’’ ofpinzochere,which proliferated in the last decades of the 1200 s.
As with the mendicants themselves, communal almsgiving underwrote this
explosion of women’s houses. At Bologna, the larger houses of Dominican
and Franciscan nuns received annual grants comparable to those of the fri-
ars.^56 Even when grants going to women’s houses were not as large as those
50 .Legenda Beatae Christianae, 16 , pp. 200 – 201 ; miracles: ibid., 45 – 47 , pp. 223 – 26.
51. Gabriella Zarri, ‘‘I monasteri femminili a Bologna tra ilxiiieilxvisecolo,’’AMDSPPR,n.s., 24
( 1973 ): 133.
52. Ibid., 157.
53. Significantly, perhaps, when Ezzelino III da Romano cast off his wives, they took refuge in older
Benedictine foundations, Gisla di Sambonifacio at Sant’Agnese and Selvaggia at Santi Narborre e Felice.
See Luigi Simeoni, ‘‘Due mogli di Ezzelino rifugiate nei monasteri bolognesi,’’L’Archiginnasio 38 ( 1943 ):
87 – 92.
54. Zarri, ‘‘Monasteri,’’ 135 – 36. Extinctions began after 1310 : ibid., 139 – 40.
55. E.g., the cluster of Dominican nuns’ houses around San Domenico in Bologna: ibid., 151 – 58.
56. Bologna Stat.i( 1252 ), 5. 19 , 1 : 454 (£ 50 to the Dominicans at Ronzano); ( 1253 ), 5. 20 , 1 : 454 (£ 50 a
year to the Franciscan nuns).