ABSTRACT
By the time she died in 1320, Margarità of Citta di Castello had acquired a considerable local reputation for sanctity. An acknowledged visionary despite being blind from birth, she had lived for a number of years as a Dominican tertiary. Although illiterate and of humble origin, she had commented on the Psalms with the authority of a master of theology, and eyewitnesses reported that she had levitated during prayer. 1 Impressed by these abilities, the local Dominicans decided to embalm her corpse as a relic. Accordingly, they had her body publicly opened and eviscerated on the high altar of their church, burying her entrails in a vessel in the convent cloister. Some time later, as the miracles associated with her proliferated, the friars decided to exhume the entrails, in order to transfer her heart to a golden reliquary for display. In the words of the author of one of Margarita’s two fourteenthcentury Latin vitae,
When [the vessel] had been taken out, and while brother Niccolò was cutting the reed to which the heart was attached,… suddenly three wonderful [mirabiles] little stones fell out of the reed, with different images impressed [ymagines impressas] on them. On one was seen sculpted the face of a very beautiful woman with a golden crown, which certain people interpreted as a likeness of the glorious blessed virgin Mary, to whom the blessed Margaret was attached with enormous devotion. The second showed a little boy in a cradle, surrounded by cattle, which certain people said signified Christ or the birth of Christ. On the third little stone was sculpted the image of a bald man with a gray beard and a golden cloak on his shoulders; before him knelt a woman dressed in the Dominican habit, and they said that this pictured the blessed Joseph and the blessed Margarita. On the side of the same stone was a white dove, which they said represented the Holy Spirit, by which Mary conceived her Son. And thus it appeared that where the heart of Margaret was, there also was found a wonderful treasure. 2
