The Poor Clares convent of Corpus Christi began as a house of semi-religious women or Beguines (termed pinzochere or bizzoche in Italian) founded by a Ferrarese merchant's daughter Bernardina da Giorgio Sedazzari between December 1406 and June 1407. This reflected a widespread late medieval movement towards women's communities or ‘open monasteries’ influenced by the Devotio Moderna. The eighteenthcentury Ferrarese historian Baruffaldi called Corpus Christi an ‘informal female hermitical group’. In modern times, Sensi describes pinzochere as ‘hermits of the city’ who practiced a semi-religious life with moderate enclosure—visiting churches during the day, begging door to door, comforting the sick, even traveling long distances on pilgrimages.3 Gill and Herlihy portray them as ‘un-cloistered religious middle-class women who often worked in the fields of midwifery and medicine’. In Ferrara five or six such houses were established c.1400–1450 near the Augustinian Hermit convent of Sant’Andrea. Bernardina's community, as well as another house founded by her sister Giovanna, formed part of this circle. The ‘hospital or oratory of Corpo di Christo’, as it was first called, had no relationship with San Guglielmo, the Poor Clares convent that had been founded c.1255. Sedazzari's residence seems to have been a refuge for widows, poor women and orphans, a parallel to Franciscan tertiary communities founded by Angelina of Montegiove in Foligno, except that it was sanctioned by the local bishop and secular d’Este rulers, and not endowed with Papal recognition. As Lombardi notes, the women's independent and open lifestyle is a fundamental point of departure for their history.

Corpus Christi was studied first by Italian religious historians Samaritani and Lombardi, who viewed it as ‘a revealing case of the conventualization’ of north Italian pinzochere, and then by American scholars who saw its history in more sociological, anthropological and feminist terms. Samaritani presents the reform as a collaborative process between laywomen and bourgeois professional notaries who helped one resident, Ailisia de Baldo, establish a second Augustinian convent. Foletti, while investigating Caterina Vigri's early life, finds religious strife within the community after its founder's death.