This study of Corpus Christi, an influential Poor Clare convent in northeast Italy, traces its evolution from a pinzochere house, through its growth as a center of Observant Franciscan reform, to maturation as a venerable Ferrarese religious institution with an educational mission and civic identity connected with the d’Este rulers. The history of a particular institution from c.1410 to c.1520 adds depth and breadth to the knowledge of fifteenth-century cloistered women's lives. Extant documentation, visual culture, and artistic and literary works, often in the women's own charismatic voices, offer a singular opportunity to look inside enclosed religious life. The book has focused on Caterina Vigri's life as a nun and mistress of novices during her 30 years in Ferrara rather than her death and holy cult in Bologna. Unlike the ‘living saints’ who were cultivated by d’Este and Gonzaga rulers as court adornments, consulted for prophecies, prayer and protection, Sister Caterina and her closest companions occupied a different civic and religious space. By drawing novices into the convent from cities across northern Italy, they increased the civic piety and actively spread the model of Observant Reform to a broad range of society.

The pinzochere house illuminates the independent, semi-religious women's urban-living style. Knowledge of Italian Beguine houses has been hampered by lack of empirical data. Bernardina Sedazzari's construction of the house using her own financial resources demonstrates that by working with male relatives, women could negotiate pious communities without church supervision. Serving the clergy as needlewomen of ecclesiastical vestments, they survived in the marginal spaces of Ferrarese society for twenty years. The inventory of 1426 demonstrates the kind of altarpieces, devotional objects like the Gesu Bambino, and relics that were important to them. They interacted with these religious devotional objects and achieved a physical and material sense of the Divine. The Dream of the Virgin, which depicts a laywoman reading close by the sleeping Virgin Mary's side, symbolizes their everyday proximity to the Divine.