Abstract
This epilogue highlights Catherine of Siena (d. 1380). In 1395, the Dominican master general, Raymond of Capua, finally completed the Legenda maior sive Legenda admirabilis virginis Catherine de Senis. This was the culmination of at least a decade of writing by Catherine's last Dominican confessor. Scholars have studied how meticulously Raymond constructed a portrait of Catherine to emphasize the penitential extremes to which she subjected her body, her Christocentric piety, her resolute connection to the Dominican order, and her role as a public prophet. However, in light of the conclusions drawn in this study, one can also see that in Raymond's as well as other Dominican promoters' hands, Catherine's life was not only a means for promoting the papacy during a period of schism as well as encouraging reform of the Dominican Order, but also an opportunity to bring to full fruition the ideas and ideals about what constituted a holy lay life that had developed between the mid-twelfth and fourteenth centuries. As F. Thomas Luongo has argued, the very idea of Catherine—an unmarried laywoman who had a rigorous penitential commitment yet lived outside of a convent—raised a tension that her first Dominican hagiographers were particularly anxious to allay. That tension was essentially the problem of the female lay penitent.