Very few women can claim to have converted their husbands by being late with dinner but Biagia Ceretani, the wife of John Columbini, is one of them. John Columbini was born in Siena about 1304, and at the time of his marriage was a successful merchant. He was, it seems, intent only on increasing his worldly goods, ambitious, close-fisted and choleric. His biographers say that he gave way to bad temper without scruple though there is no evidence that he did anything more violent than ‘turn the air blue'.

One day he came home after a busy morning, tired and hungry, to an unlaid table and a meal half-prepared. Very naturally he ‘blew his top’ as the saying goes. Biagia, hoping to distract him, thrust a volume of saints’ lives upon him and more naturally still, her husband flung it on the floor.