In addition to her identity as a saint, reformer, political activist and visionary, Catherine of Siena was uniquely affiliated with two groundbreaking institutions of the late middle ages: the lay confraternity and the third order. This paper focuses specifically on the figure of Catherine in order to address several important questions related to confraternity studies, including the role of gender in distinguishing lay devotional groups, the nature of women’s participation in confraternities, and the problem of their practice of the discipline. The resulting study sheds new light on Catherine’s corporate devotional identity by documenting her commemoration in text, image, and historical memory as both a consorella and a mantellata.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Moerer, E. A., (2025), "Consorella or Mantellata? Notes on Catherine of Siena’s Confraternal Legacy", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

  Copy Citation | Export metadata as... | JSON | CSV | RO-Crate | BibTex | EndNote

1. Confraternitas

Original publication: Moerer, Emily A. “Consorella or Mantellata? Notes on Catherine of Siena’s Confraternal Legacy.” Confraternitas 18 (1): 2010. 2-15. DOI: . This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Confraternitas. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Confraternitas under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.