Catherine Lawless

Author Abstract Text Keywords: Full text: DOI: Biographical note

This article will examine an unusual legend contained in Florentine fifteenth-century manuscripts concerning St Ismeria, the ‘grandmother’ of the Virgin. Unlike more well-known versions of the Holy Kinship of Christ, where Ismeria is described as the sister of St Anne and grandmother of St John the Baptist, in this legend she is instead firmly described as St Anne’s mother and thus the grandmother of the Virgin and the great-grandmother of Christ. Most of the legend is concerned with Ismeria’s life of penitential piety as a wife and widow and has little in common with standard legends of the Virgin or of St Anne, but has strong resonances within the world of late medieval Florentine piety and the type of ‘new’ sanctity defined by Vauchez, where sanctity is earned by a life of penitence rather than with blood martyrdom. The contents of the codices which house the legends are typical of medieval vernacular writings and contain more traditional lives of the Virgin and accounts of the Holy Kinship. The way in which these legends lay side by side with such contradictory material suggests a fluidity in the way holy narratives were accepted.

This article will explore the relationship between the Medici and their patron saints, and in particular, between Cosimo de’ Medici and St Peter Martyr. It will suggest that the choice of St Peter Martyr instead of St Peter Apostle to be the name saint of Piero di Cosimo de’ Medici was related to Cosimo's interest in the Observant reform and the Council of Florence. A cult devoted to the Dominican saint, famous for both monastic reform and his conquest of heresy, would benefit both Cosimo de’ Medici and the recently installed Observant Dominicans at San Marco.