Digital visionary women: introducing the “Catalogue of Living Saints”

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article introduces the “Catalogue of Living Saints,” a wiki catalogue that provides knowledge about the lives of Castilian charismatic women, prior to Teresa of Ávila (d. 1582), who acquired reputations for holiness in their own times. The lives of these “holy” women show great contact between court and convent, and they contribute to better understanding the history of women and their subsequent impact on society. The collected lives appeared in a diversity of sources: manuscripts of the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, including conventual books and compendia containing lives of saints, handwritten and printed chronicles of religious orders in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Castile, and other works. Thus, the Catalogue recovers several texts that have never been printed before and that in most cases were never edited independently. Furthermore, it integrates the development of a database in order to understand the different proposed hagiographical models and their performative shape and spatial distribution of power. Additionally, this article discusses how gathering, editing, and reading the lives of these women via an open-access virtual tool creates a new hermeneutical framework regarding the materiality of the original codices and printed volumes. Finally, it proposes mitigation measures in the near future to bring contemporary reading practices (and interpretation) closer to historical ones.