After a century of silence, St. Guglielma suddenly reemerges from the shadows around 1425, with a full-length hagiographic vita that bears only the faintest resemblance to her actual story. Her latter-day legend was the work of Antonio Bonfadini, a friar of Ferrara (d. 1428), as we learn from a contemporary's list of Franciscan writers. (83) Nothing is known of this author except that he also produced a collection of sermons and one other vernacular saint's life. But the very existence of the legend reveals that St. Guglielma's popular cult had not only survived the inquisition of 1300, but spread well beyond the confines of Milan. There is no way to know how widely she was venerated outside of her adopted city before 1300. If her cult had already spread to neighboring cities and villages, carried by Milanese travelers, it is possible that devotees outside of Milan remained either unaware of or undeterred by her posthumous heretication. But the reemergence of her sainthood in Ferrara is not totally surprising, for it is to that city that Galeazzo Visconti withdrew to join his wife's family during the Della Torre ascendancy of 1302-10. It would have been an act of piety and defiance alike if, to spite the inquisitors, he had brought the devotion to St. Guglielma with him. In any case, Bonfadini's text presupposes the prior existence of a cult without a vita. Somewhere in Ferrara a saint named Guglielma was being worshipped, perhaps even in a chapel dedicated to her name; but by 1425, no one remembered who she was. So the path lay open to invention.
Bonfadini's work may be his free literary creation, or it may incorporate tales already attached to the saint in popular legend. The story he tells is a version of the Calumniated Wife, one of late medieval Europe's best-loved folktales. Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale is a distant analogue. The story of Patient Griselda is related at a further remove, though it is a tale Bonfadini is more likely to have known through the versions of Petrarch and Boccaccio. Whatever his sources, the friar presents St. Guglielma as a daughter of the king of England, sought in marriage by the newly converted king of Hungary. The pious maid would have preferred to remain a virgin but consents in obedience to her parents. Once married, Guglielma "preaches so assiduously" to her new husband that he begins to delight in the stories of saints and the Passion of Christ. So she proposes a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but to her disappointment, the king decides to go alone and leave her behind as regent. No sooner has the king departed than his brother, who is supposed to be protecting the queen, begins to make lustful advances to her. When she rejects them, he sets his heart on vengeance, which he obtains by going to meet the king as he returns from Jerusalem. With feigned reluctance, he tells the king that the queen has betrayed him with a squire, as everyone in the palace knows. He then vows that he will never return to court until the treacherous queen is dead. Without waiting to learn more, the king regretfully condemns his wife to death by burning--a sentence to be carried out by night to avoid public scandal. Fortunately, however, Guglielma's heartfelt prayers persuade her executioners that she is innocent, so they free her and burn an animal instead, presenting its bones to the judges along with some scorched rags of the queen's vesture.
Guglielma meanwhile escapes into exile, dressed in squalid peasant garb. One day as she hides in a forest, waiting to continue her journey by night, she is surprised in a thicket by hunting dogs. The huntsmen, seeing a pretty but shabbily dressed young woman alone in the woods, assume she is sexually available. But Guglielma appeals against them to the lord of the hunt, who turns out to be the king of France. With all her modesty and eloquence, she pleads with him to protect an honest poverella from abuse. Impressed by her courtly bearing, he decides she cannot possibly be a peasant and resolves to bring her home to his wife as a lady-in-waiting. Although the queen of France is initially put off by her vile clothing, she becomes deeply attached to Guglielma once she has seen her in court attire. In fact, when the queen bears her firstborn son shortly afterward, Guglielma is chosen to be his governess. All goes well until the seneschal, falling in love with Guglielma, asks for her hand in marriage. The king and queen are delighted with the proposed alliance, but Guglielma tactfully declines without acknowledging that she already has a husband. History now repeats itself, and the spurned seneschal, like the Hungarian king's brother, is bent on revenge.
An opportunity presents itself when the seneschal finds the young prince sleeping alone in Guglielma's chamber while she is at church. Quickly he strangles the boy and plants evidence pointing to Guglielma. The saint is thrown into prison, even though the king and queen cannot quite believe that she is guilty of so heinous a crime. "Rigorously examined," Guglielma swears she is innocent but cannot name the real murderer. The seneschal, however, stirs up the judges to cry for her death, saying she has bewitched the king and queen so they cannot believe in her guilt. Once again, however, God delivers Guglielma from persecution. The Virgin Mary appears to her in a dream, giving her the power to heal all sufferers who are truly repentant and willing to confess their sins. Then, on the night she is to be burned, two angels cause the executioners to fall asleep while Guglielma prays. As they slumber, the angels escort her to a castle by the sea, where they pay her passage aboard a mysterious ship. On the voyage Guglielma has occasion to display her gift of healing when all the sailors are suddenly afflicted with terrible headaches. After this they hold her in the greatest reverence. When the ship arrives at an unnamed shore, the captain escorts Guglielma to a nunnery where his aunt is abbess. The saint says she "is not disposed to become a professed nun," but happily agrees to remain with the sisters as their servant. To further inquiries about herself she replies only, "I call myself a great sinner; my people are those who wish to do the will of God." (84) During her three years at the convent as cook, portress, and lay sister, Guglielma continually heals those who come to her and develops a great reputation for miracles.
At last it happens that her Hungarian brother-in-law, who had sent her to the stake through slander, is punished by God with leprosy. By a strange coincidence the same fate befalls the seneschal of France. Both men repent of their secret sins and decide to go on pilgrimage to the famous healer, accompanied by their respective kings. Guglielma, learning of these imminent visits, disguises herself by putting on a nun's habit. She then entices her former enemies into making full confessions in the presence of the French and Hungarian kings, whom she has first bound by a promise to forgive the men no matter what they might reveal. In the presence of a large crowd, Guglielma makes the penitents kneel and cleanses the lepers. Finally she discloses her own identity and history, much to their astonishment. Returning home at last with her husband, she lives happily ever after, giving alms to the poor and establishing many churches and monasteries, until God calls her to everlasting bliss.
This hagiographic romance is a potpourri of motifs that, at first blush, have little to do with Guglielma of Milan but are more reminiscent of St. Ursula, Constance, Griselda, and even Guinevere. (85) There are nevertheless a few points of rapport with the historical Guglielma. The saint is said to be English, as in the 1301 Annals of Colmar, but her union with the Hungarian king recalls her East European origins. She is a victim of slander and unjust prosecution who--twice--narrowly escapes being burned at the stake, as her followers were. Though famed as a healer, she calls herself a sinful woman. Living much of her life in exile, she is deliberately mysterious about her native land. Finally, just as Guglielma of Milan made close friends at the convent of Biassono but never became a nun, the Guglielma of Bonfadini's legend spends several years at a nunnery but remains a laywoman. The friar does not specify the order or location of this convent: although his heroine moves from England to Hungary to France, her sojourn with the nuns is left so vague that she could be claimed by any that wanted her--and in the end, it was the convent at Brunate that did.
Bonfadini's vita did not circulate widely. In fact, it survives in a single manuscript, which remained with the Franciscans of Ferrara until the time of Napoleon. But either his text or one derived from it eventually reached a Florentine humanist, Antonia Pulci (1452-1501), whose version gave the tale far greater currency. Pulci was a playwright who wrote convent dramas; after her husband's death in 1487 she lived as a pinzochera in Florence, just as Guglielma herself had done two centuries earlier in Milan. The Play of Saint Guglielma, one of seven dramas in Pulci's canon, versifies Bonfadini's legend in rhyming eight-line stanzas broken up among the dramatis personae, and wisely simplifies its plot. (86) Omitting the episode at the French court, Pulci moves directly from Guglielma's first escape from the stake to her dream of the Virgin, sea voyage, and sojourn with the still unidentified nuns. She also modifies the end of the legend: the king of Hungary, Queen Guglielma, and her brother-in-law all resolve to leave the court and live as hermits, and since the king is childless, his barons are left to govern the realm as they see fit. Our unworldly playwright does not concern herself with the civil war that doubtless would have ensued. But in other respects her play remains faithful to Bonfadini's vita, and its publishing history shows that she knew what her public wanted. Aside from convent performances, thirteen editions of Saint Guglielma were printed in Florence between 1490 and 1597, in addition to three Sienese editions (1579, 1617, and one undated). Further seventeenth-century editions were published in Venice, Viterbo, Macerata, Perugia, and Pistoia, though--strangely enough--never Milan. (87)