Faith and Health
Holy men and women, visionaries and a martyr.
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How a cloth merchant's son from Assisi embraced poverty, gathered followers and founded the Franciscans, one of the most influential religious movements of its age.
Catherine of Siena, a dyer's daughter turned mystic, wrote hundreds of letters and pressed popes to return to Rome during a turbulent century for the church.
Hildegard of Bingen led a convent in the Rhineland and wrote on visions, music, nature and medicine in the twelfth century, with unusual reach for a woman.
Julian of Norwich lived as an anchoress in a cell beside a church and wrote the Showings, the earliest surviving book in English known to be by a woman.
Marguerite of Navarre was a sixteenth-century princess, patron and writer, not a medieval saint. Here is her religious and literary life, including the Heptameron.
How Thomas Becket and Henry II fell out, how four knights killed the archbishop in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170, and how his tomb became a major shrine.
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