36TH ANNUAL BERNARDO LECTURE
“MARGHERITA COLONNA: A RELIGIOUS REBEL IN THIRTEENTH-CENTURY ROME”
SEAN L. FIELD, Professor, Department of History, University of Vermont
- Thursday, November 5, 2026
- Old Champlain Atrium
- 4:30 p.m. Reception | 5 - 6 p.m. Lecture
Margherita Colonna lived a short but fascinating life (c. 1255–1280). Born into one of the most powerful families of Rome, she rejected the marriage planned for her by her brother, the Roman Senator Giovanni Colonna, and instead by 1272 embraced a life of virginity.
Although her family wished her to become a professed nun, or to enter a new convent that they would build for her, Margherita instead insisted on founding and leading an informal group of spiritual sisters who gathered around her, first at the family compound atop Mount Prenestino, and then at the nearby shrine of Mentorella.
After a Roman interlude in which Margherita joined the household of “Lady Altruda of the Poor,” she returned to her fledgling community at Mount Prenestino for the rest of her life. How can we make sense of the way Margherita and her spiritual sisters interacted with the society around them, particularly atop Mount Prenestino, in the 1270s, while living an informal religious life with “no abbess or superior”?
This talk will analyze the two contemporary lives of Margherita—one by Giovanni Colonna and the other by a follower named Stefania—to tease out evidence for the way this religious rebel defied societal expectations in order to care for the poor, the hungry, and the sick, as an embodiment of mendicant ideals in the world.
This talk is presented by The Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. The Bernardo Lecture Series in the Humanities honors an esteemed colleague, the late Professor Aldo Bernardo, who taught Romance Languages at Binghamton for many years and co-founded the Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies with Bernard Huppé in 1966.
The series offers annual lectures by distinguished scholars on topics related to Prof. Bernardo’s fields of interest—medieval and Renaissance history and culture—with a particular focus on Italian literature and intellectual history. Most of the lectures have subsequently been published as individual booklets in a series of occasional papers sponsored by SUNY Press.
- Past Bernardo Lectures
- Robert Hollander, Dante and Paul’s “Five Words with Understanding” (1990)
- Joan M. Ferrante, Dante’s Beatrice: Priest of an Androgynous God (1991)
- Ciriaco Morón Arroyo, Celestina and Castilian Humanism at the End of the Fifteenth Century (1992)
- Thomas M. Greene, Besieging the Castle of Ladies (1993)
- Peter K. Marshall, Servius and Commentary of Virgil (1994)
- John Freccero, Dante’s Cosmos (1995)
- Sara Sturm-Maddox, Dante and Petrarch: The Earthy Paradise Revisited (1996)
- Teodolinda Barolini, Desire and Death, or Francesca and Guido Cavalcanti: Inferno 5 in its Lyric Context (1997)
- William J. Kennedy, Totems for Defense and Illustrations of Taboo: Sites of Petrarchism in Renaissance Europe (1998)
- Maria Rosa Menocal, Writing Without Footnotes: The Role of the Medievalist in Contemporary Intellectual Life (1999)
- Giuseppe Mazzotta, Dante Between Philosophers and Theologians: Paradiso X-XIII (2000)
- Luce López-Baralt, A Renaissance Kama Sutra: A Spanish Love Treatise in the Islamic Tradition (2001)
- Victoria Kirkham, Dante the Book Glutton, Or, Food for Thought from Italian Poets (2002)
- Rachel Jacoff, Dante and the Jewish Question (2003)
- Christopher Kleinhenz, Movement and Meaning in the Divine Comedy (2004)
- Nancy Regalado, The Reader in the World: Democratizing Interpretation in Medieval French Literature (2005)
- William Cook and Ronald B Herzman, A Dual Perspective on Dante (2006)
- Deborah Parker, From Experience to Expression: Representations of Captivity in Michelangelo’s Art, Poetry, and Letters (2007)
- Dino Cervigni, From Divine to Human: Dante’s Circle vs. Boccaccio’s Parodic Centers (2008)
- Albert Russell Ascoli, “Favola fui”: Petrarch Writes his Readers (2009)
- Sara Kay, Troubadour Songs and the Cultural Geography of Europe (2010)
- Lino Pertile, Dante’s Inferno, Auschwitz, and Poetry (2011)
- Zygmunt Baranski, Inferno XVIII: Language as Sin and Salvation (2013)
- Edward W. Muir, Jr. “To Trust is Good, But Not to Trust is Better”: The Italian Paradox (2014)
- Mary J. Carruthers, Terror, Horror, and the Fear of God (2015)
- Ronald L. Martinez, Cleansing the Temple: Dante, Defender of the Church (2016)
- Margo Fassler, Cosmos and Creation in the Twelfth Century: Hildegard’s Visions with Excerpts from her Compositions (2017)
- Carol Lansing, Forgotten Models; the Lost Worlds of Medieval Rome and its Region (2018)
- Alison Cornish, Dante and the Legibility of the Universe: Facts and Narratives (2019)
- Geraldine Heng, Teaching the Literatures of the Global Middle Ages (2020)
- Justin Steinberg, On Dante’s Virgil and Medieval Anti-Judaism (2023)
- Jean E. Howard, “I Was a Stranger”: Hospitality’s Flawed Promise in Shakespeare’s London Suburbs (2024)
- Holly Flora, Beyond the Book of Hours: Female Lay Readers and the Wounds of Saint Francis (2025)