Guglielma of Milan

(d. 1282)



Founder of an Italian religious group. Her astonishing career was one of the consequences of the prophetic movement launched by Joachim of Fiore. That twelfth-century abbot and biblical scholar applied the doctrine of the Trinity to the course of history. According to his teaching, there had been an age of God the Father, corresponding roughly to the Old Testament, followed by an age of God the Son, corresponding to the New Testameot and the dominance of the Church. Thus far he was not too original, but he went beyond. There would be a third age, the age of the Holy Spirit, corresponding to the Third Person of the Trinity. New religious orders untainted by power and wealth would lead the way into it, and it would be an era of peace, liberty, love, and universal enlightenment.
Joachim was not subversive himself, but after his death, his prophecy was taken up by extremists who used it against the papacy and the existing Church. It was popular with dissident Franciscans who believed that Saint Francis had been the herald of the new day and his mission had been betrayed. Joachim had indicated, unwisely, that the year 1260 would mark the transition to the Age of the Holy Spirit. Nothing obviously happened, but some saw the prophecy as being fulfilled by Guglielma Boema, a Milanese woman who went much further than the most radical Franciscans.
Records are scanty, but she is said to have begun her activities about 1262, and she was certainly attracting disciples in 1271. Some of them were people of social standing. Her circle revered her as the Holy Spirit incarnate. The theology was lucid and logical. The Son of God had become a man—Christ—to establish the second age; so the Holy Spirit had become a woman to establish the third.
The idea of the Spirit’s femininity is not unknown to Christian thinking; artists have seldom committed themselves to any human

image for the Third Person of the Trinity. Guglielma, however, brought speculation down to earth. Such accounts of her teaching as remain are due to a male disciple, Andreas Saramita, and a woman associated with him, Manfreda. She was probably related to the Visconti, a prominent family in Milan. The Guglielmites believed that the male papacy was finished. Through some unexplained but peaceable revolution, Manfreda was to become pope and appoint women cardinals. The feminized Church would heal religious divisions and draw Jews and Saracens into a single fold. Saramita would preside over the composition of new scriptures, embodying the new revelation.
During Guglielma’s lifetime, it does not appear that there was any official condemnation of her activities. She died in 1282 and was buried in a Cistercian monastery at Chiaravalle. The group survived and held gatherings around her tomb, seemingly with a hope of her rising from the dead. It became clear that the movement would not expire of its own accord. An ecclesiastical ban fell in 1300. About thirty persons were inculpated, and Saramita, Manfreda, and another woman were put to death as heretics. Inquisitors exhumed Guglielma’s bones and burned them to discourage the notion of her resurrection.