Las vidas occitanas de santas tardomedievales: sacra infantia, formación e imitación

Abstract

This article focuses on the analysis of four texts that have had little impact on the study of late medieval spirituality and that have never been worked on as a single corpus: the lives written in Occitan about women with the reputation of saints who lived between the 13th and 14th centuries: Doucelina de Dinha (d.1274 ), a Beguine of Robaut; Biatrix d’Ornaciu (d.1303), a Carthusian nun of Permagni; Dalphina de Pugmichel (d.1360), a mulier religiosa close to the Franciscans of Apt; and Flor d’Issendolus (d.1347), a Hospitaller of the Order of St. John. These are the only testimonies of a phenomenon that spread between the 13th and 16th centuries in different European areas and that Gabriella Zarri has called sante vive: women considered as saints by the society of their time even though they had not been canonized. Part of the dissemination of the cult of these women was through the writing of their lives, whose models followed established patterns in terms of structure and literary tropes.