Introduction and historiographical overview

On Tuesday, 1 April 1483, Sister Eufemia dei Magni, aged 27 years, died in south-west Milan, at the monastery of Santa Maria Maddalena al Cerchio in the Porta Ticinese district. The district was named after one of the city’s medieval gates, part of the twelfth-century wall system built after the city had been destroyed by Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa. Beyond the gates ran the Naviglio Grande, a purpose-built canal that moved people and goods in a constant motion between the city and the Ticino River, located some fifty kilometres south-west of the city. Porta Ticinese was a busy, boisterous and densely settled district. Alongside the monastery and the ancient Basilica of San Lorenzo Maggiore with its Colonne di San Lorenzo, it housed the Citadella – like the walls and the early canal system, constructed for the medieval defence of the city against Barbarossa and his allies. Here too was located much of the city’s industrial and artisanal production. A short distance away, the waters of the outer and inner canals mixed with river water, creating an ever-changing combination of clean and dirty water that both removed waste and powered the city’s economic development and dominance – but also sometimes, like the by-products of the numerous commercial enterprises, gave rise to local concern about corruption and disease. Noise permeated the air, as did the fetid miasma arising from the many bodies working in the April sun in the mills and warehouses, at the workshops and on the nearby wharves. Within her darkened cell, however, Eufemia died quietly; the sisters’ desperate fluttering of care and uncertainties about how to stay well themselves passed unheard and unseen outside the monastery’s thick walls.

Sister Eufemia died in the early months of a catastrophic outbreak of plague that ravaged Milan between 1483 and 1486. The streets were not yet empty of people fearing the disease and, despite several possible plague deaths in the district already, life was carrying on largely as normal. Eufemia had fallen ill on the previous Thursday morning while distributing alms to the local poor. Described in her post-mortem record as ‘strenuous and burdensome’ (‘forti et honeroso’), Eufemia’s almsgiving brought her into direct physical contact with the district’s most desperate residents, many of whom were ill, injured or otherwise incapacitated, hoping not only for the worldly relief that the alms offered but also some spiritual assistance as well.