The heretic saint: Guglielma of Bohemia, Milan, and Brunate

Church History, March, 2005 by Mona Alice Jean Newman

High above Lake Como in Lombardy, overlooking the cathedral city of Como and the southwestern branch of the lake, looms the tiny village of Brunate. It is a picturesque spot, beloved of mountain climbers, which enjoyed a brief heyday as a tourist mecca in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. An efficient if ear-popping funicular railway, inaugurated in 1894, now scales the steep cliff in a brisk seven minutes. But in the Middle Ages, when most of our story is set, Brunate was as remote and inaccessible a site as one could hope to find. A hagiographer around 1600 described it as an "ignoble village on that mountain whose vast ridge towers above the city to the east.... The mountain is arduous and laborious to climb." (2) In 1578 the village had a mere 156 inhabitants, and as late as 1900 its year-round population was barely over 500. (3)

From the top of the funicular line, a stairway leads up to the baroque church of San Andrea, whose cheerful pink facade opens onto the village's main piazza (Figure 1). Inside is a crystal reliquary holding the bones of Brunate's own beata, the Augustinian abbess Maddalena Albrizzi (d. 1465), beatified in 1907. An unremarkable modern painting represents Albrizzi in a nun's habit, holding a crucifix. On the north wall of the church is another painting in an elaborate marble frame (Figure 2)--this one a fresco from circa 1450, older than the surviving fabric of the church itself. Around 1745, in the course of renovations, the fresco was cut out of the wall that had supported it, framed at considerable expense, and moved to its present, awkward location on the pier of an arch. (4) The dominant figure is another local favorite, St. Guglielma, whose unofficial feast is celebrated each year on the fourth Sunday of April. (5) Her feast is "unofficial" because, unlike Maddalena Albrizzi, St. Guglielma does not appear in the Acta Sanctorum or even the local martyrology, nor is she honored anywhere but in the village of Brunate. In view of the romance that constitutes her legend, one might wonder if she is only a figure of folklore, like Saint Christopher and a hundred others demoted in the reforms after Vatican II.

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The truth, however, is far stranger. The woman called Guglielma was real enough, but even in her lifetime, she was already one of those mysterious, spellbinding figures whose destiny is to attract the powerful projections of others, for better and worse. Around 1260 she arrived in Milan from parts unknown, apparently a widow, and adopted the life of a pinzochera--a religious woman living independently in her own home, much like the beguines of northern Europe. Her simple but charismatic teaching and her reputation as a healer quickly attracted disciples, both women and men, who clung to her and to one another with fierce loyalty. It was persistently rumored that she was a daughter of the King of Bohemia--a rumor that may have been true, and, whether it was or not, significantly enhanced Guglielma's claims to sanctity. By the time of her death on August 24, 1281, she was the center of a devoted religious famiglia. Buried in the Cistercian abbey of Chiaravalle, she immediately became the object of a saint cult with all the usual trappings. But canonization was not to be Guglielma's fate, for the ambitions of her inner circle extended far beyond it. Inspired by a man she called her "firstborn son," the layman Andrea Saramita, and a nun of the Umiliate order, Sister Maifreda da Pirovano, more than three dozen mostly upper-class citizens of Milan had come to believe that Guglielma was no less than the Holy Spirit herself, incarnate in the form of a woman. Despite her own vigorous denials, these devotees taught that the Holy Spirit had come to found a new, inclusive church, superseding the corrupt one ruled by Boniface VIII, and through her, Jews, pagans, and Saracens would be saved. After Guglielma's resurrection and ascension, this utopian church would be led by her "earthly vicar"--none other than Sister Maifreda, the papessa of the age to come. (6)

All this is heady stuff and, needless to say, heresy. Two decades after Guglielma's death, the activities of her apostles came, inevitably, to the attention of a Dominican tribunal charged with conducting inquisitions in Milan. In a lengthy trial extending from July through December of 1300, the year of jubilee, these inquisitors interrogated at least thirty-three citizens, including Saramita and Maifreda, both of whom paid for their doctrine with their lives. (7) A second nun, Sister Giacoma dei Bassani da Nova, was also burned at the stake, while many others were sentenced to wear penitential crosses and pay hefty fines. Guglielma herself was posthumously condemned on the basis of a confession almost certainly extracted by torture from Saramita. The Dominicans were less interested in ascertaining her genuine beliefs than in expunging her cult, which they could do only by exhuming her body--a desecration that would have been unlawful were she not a proven heretic. Having created the evidence they required, the inquisitors proceeded to have Guglielma's tomb dismantled, her images destroyed, her disciples' writings consigned to the fire, her bones burned and their ashes scattered, her memory utterly damned.