During the 31 years that Sister Caterina lived at Corpus Christi, Ferrara, she taught the novices, helped her fellow nuns, suffered through crises of faith, experienced divine visions, and wrote prolifically about obedience and humility. Her spiritual treatise begun in the 1430s and revised around 1450–55 before she moved to Bologna, now known under the title the Sette Armi Spirituali, was written as a manual for novices. In her own words, her purpose was to ‘guard them against mistaken ideas and infidelity, to narrate the stories of the saints, to help novices recognize Christ's infinite charity and thus increase their faith’. She laid out a path toward spiritual perfection that the novices were urged to follow. The popularity of the text, which circulated after her death throughout a network of Poor Clare convents, testifies to its didactic value. Only in recent decades has Vigri been confirmed as author of the Dodici Giardini (1434–37), lauds, letters, and the 5595-verse Latin poetic prayer Rosarium, and sermons re-copied in the sixteenth century. As one of a select group of Italian women religious writers in the first half of the fifteenth century, Vigri's life and literary work have received wide attention.

This chapter examines the Sette Armi Spirituali in the context of the Corpus Christi convent audience. Who were the women Caterina Vigri was addressing in her teaching? Corpus Christi archives give evidence of the nuns’ family backgrounds, community and literacy, including surnames, places of origin, birth dates, professions and deaths of about 135 women who entered the convent in 1426–1500 (see Appendix II). While there were illiterate nuns (which explains Vigri's emphasis on memory and oral learning), a central core of widows from ruling families of neighboring city-states, daughters of the professional class, and patrician families gave the community its elite character. The notion that Vigri had a humanist education with Guarino Guarini (who arrived in Ferrara after she had left the d’Este court) must be abandoned for a more realistic view: the family's zentilhomini nuovi status and her association with Borso's sister Margherita d’Este probably accounts for her education.