The Wounds of Saint Francis and Female Devotion in an Illuminated <i>Legenda Maior</i>

Abstract A little-known illuminated manuscript of the Legenda maior made for an unnamed laywoman in Milan ca. 1350 (MS 411 at the Biblioteca Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele II in Rome) is an example of hagiographic text adapted for devotional use. This article examines the way that MS 411 emphasizes the side wound of Christ or of Francis (which is of course Christ’s wound, also acquired via Francis’s stigmatization) as a focal point for the manuscript’s female reader. In MS 411’s highly personalized image cycle, the female devotee appears four times kneeling before either Christ or Francis, who expose their side wounds. The wound in Christ’s side, which can take on the appearance also of a vagina, is sometimes depicted on its own in books of hours; examples of the side wound as a singular devotional image occur in manuscripts made for lay women, such as in the Psalter-Hours of Bonne of Luxembourg in the Met Cloisters. In MS 411, the privileging of the side wound as an object of the reader’s prayer was key to this manuscript’s reimagining of the Legenda maior as a devotional text.