Catherine of Genoa 1447 – 1510

Catherine of Genoa was an Italian mystic and philanthropist of the late fifteenth century. Married young to a difficult husband, she experienced a transformative conversion at twenty-six and devoted the rest of her life to the care of the sick at the Pammatone hospital, of which she eventually became director. Her teachings, recorded by her disciples in the Treatise on Purgatory and Spiritual Dialogue, develop an austere mysticism of the soul's purifying encounter with divine love. She is one of the central figures of late medieval Italian spirituality and a principal source for later Catholic doctrine of purgatorial purification.