Catherine of Siena died at Rome on 29 April 1380, aged 33. What probably killed her?
Catherine had been fasting almost continuously for years — substantially the standard religious-ascetic practice of medieval female mystics, taken to an extreme in her case. By the last two months of her life she had been substantially refusing all food and most water. The medical-historical reconstruction is that she died of stroke produced by extended dehydration and metabolic crisis. She was buried at Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome — the same Dominican church where [Galileo would recant 253 years later](/articles/galileo-trial-1633). Canonised by Pius II in 1461; declared a Doctor of the Church by Paul VI in 1970, the first woman so recognised.
Read the full story →Catherine of Siena was an unschooled Dominican tertiary from a substantial Sienese dyer's family who became one of the most influential European Catholic figures of the 14th century. Her substantial 1376 personal mission to Avignon helped persuade Pope Gregory XI to end the seventy-year Avignon papacy. She was 29.
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