# 2 - A SERIOUS REPORT ON BLESSED MARGARET CASTELLO, O.P.
IN PURSUIT OF THE TRUTH - HTTP://WWW.CINOPSBEGONEBLOGSPOT.COM - SUN. NOV. 22, 2020
THE LIFE OF BLESSED MARGARET CASTELLO, O.P. (1287-1320)
BY FATHER WILLIAM R. BONNEVILLE, O.P. TAN BOOKS, CHARLOTTE, CAROLINA, 2014
INTRODUCTION
The story of Margaret of Castello has its setting in Italy on the eve of the Renaissance. At that time Italy was seething in furious, chaotic turmoil in which the most startling of genius and stupidity, heroism and abject cowardice, contentment and unbridled ambition, humaneness and revolting cruelty appeared side by side in swift succession.
The life-and-death conflict between a way of life deeply rooted in bygone centuries and new revolutionary ideas that were inflaming the minds of men, the struggle between the old order and the new, nowhere in Europe reached intensity or greater depths of savagery than it did in Italy. From Sicily to the Alps, the country was convulsed by an endless series of wars between the Guelphs, who resented foreign domination, and the Ghibellines, who supported the claims of the German emperors. In the grim conflict, not only were the Guelphs arrayed against the Ghibellines, but cities fought one another, while in every commune the nobility and the lower classes bitterly contended for political power and both parties were invariably split into furious factions.
The ferocity of these quarrels produced such men as Ezzelino da Romano, who inflicted terrible mutilations and horrible deaths upon thousand of men, women, and children; the Visconti tyrants, who by treachery, torture, and bloodshed, tried to gain possession of all Italy; the condottieri who unceasingly marauded the country and by arson, rape, and slaughter, left it a land of desolation. The brutal monsters depicted by Dante in the Inferno were not figments of the poet's imagination but real persons who lived in the second half of the 13th and first part of the 14th century.
Yet it was in the same atmosphere that the gentle Niccola of Pis produced his masterpieces in sculpture and in the architecture; that Cimabue and his illustrious pupil Giotto discarding the old symbolism, introduced naturalism in painting; that Dante Alighieri, an exile at Ravenna, composed his immortal Divina Commedia; that Petrach and Boccassio enthralled their readers, the one with his sonnets of love, the other with his satires and stories.
Certainly no biographer could desire a more colorful or more stirring time and place as background for his narrative. But great events require great personages, persons remarkable in the wok of art, literature, or of politics - or, in the case of a woman, someone noted at least for her beauty, or for her wit,, or even for her crimes.
For this very reason, any biographer of Margaret of Castello works under as heavy handicap, for Margaret meets none of these requirements. She committed no crimes, she was not witty; and certainly she was not beautiful. She composed no sublime poem, painted no famous picture, and occupied no outstanding position in politics. She did not even share any reflected glory by association with the great, nor was she the inspiration for genius, as Beatrice was for Dante and Laura for Petrach.
On the contrary, she was considered so insignificant that the most detailed histories of Medieval Italy do not bother to mention her. And yet we are confronted with an astonishing fact: during the course of six hundred years more than two score writers - nearly everyone of them of unusual education - chancing on some manuscript that contained an account of Margaret's life, though it well worth there while to publish the story of this obscure girl.
In bringing before the public the almost incredible story of Margaret of Castello, I am attempting to do tardy justice to one whose life has been persistently misrepresented by every writer from the end of the 14th century to the present time. Many historical persons have had their memory injured by hostile biographers; it has been the singular misfortune of Margaret to had her memory consigned almost to oblivion by friendly writers...
George H. Kubeck
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