Colette de Corbie was one of the most important reformers of the Franciscan order in the late Middle Ages. Looking back at her long career, one has to conclude that she was a natural-born leader, inspiring some of the most powerful men and women of her time, both secular and ecclesiastical, to lend support to her foundations and reforms. This support was monetary as well as spiritual and crossed the “party lines” drawn in the last stages of the Hundred Years War. Together with other saintly personages, like Saint Vincent Ferrer (1350–1419), she worked to end the Great Schism of the Western Church (1378–1417). She lived to see the end of that Schism at the Council of Constance, but not the end of the next conflict that pitted Pope Eugene IV (d.1447) against Amadeus of Savoy (1383–1451), elected as antipope Felix V in 1439 during the long drawn-out Council of Basel (1431–1449). In the midst of seemingly endless war and multiple ecclesiastical conflicts Colette managed to steer a course focused on founding new Franciscan houses and reforming existing ones. It is Colette's identity as a reformist leader and the strategies she used to implement her reforms that are at the center of this essay.

Colette's identity has a variety of facets, some of them contradictory; there appears to be a tug-of-war between acknowledgment of her leadership qualities and efforts to “contain” her in a straitjacket of saintly models, depending on the witnesses we consult. Thus, the image that her biographers Pierre De Vaux and Perrine de la Roche created of her in two biographies, dating from shortly after Colette's death in 1447 and around 1477 respectively, do not always correspond to the testimonies of other people who knew her or to those of the chroniclers who wrote about her. Nor do they square with the Colette we find in her long-delayed bull of canonization in 1807. Her quest for authority – and its success – is depicted differently in all these sources, yet a number of coherent strategies emerge. In the framework of this chapter I can touch only briefly on some of the elements that come together to create our view of Colette as a charismatic and forceful leader.