Visions, Inquisitors, and Challenges to Christian Doctrine in the Later Middle Ages

In 1300 Milanese inquisitors questioned a servant named Taria about a woman named Guglielma of Milan (d. 1281). Guglielma was venerated as a saint by such orthodox institutions as the prominent monastery of Chiaravalle. Taria’s beliefs, like those of an inner core of devotees, went much further and claimed that Guglielma had been the Holy Spirit incarnate, based in part in visions that some other sectarians experienced and described to Guglielma’s followers. When inquisitors questioned if Taria “wishes to deny that the stated holy Guglielma was not the Holy Spirit,” she responded that “she did not want to deny or affirm [it], but she very much wished that this Guglielma was the Holy Spirit.”¹ In the historical context of the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Mediterranean basin, specifically in Italy, mystical visions routinely engaged doctrine. Kenneth Pennington and James Heft have shown that the late medieval papacy viewed any issue regarding...