MARGARET was a native of Alviano, in Tuscany. The harshness of a
stepmother, and her own indulged propension to vice, cast her headlong
into the greatest disorders. The sight of the carcass of a man, half
putrefied, {444} who had been her gallant, struck her with so great a
fear of the divine judgments, and with so deep a sense of the treachery
of this world, that she in a moment became a perfect penitent. The first
thing she did was to throw herself at her father's feet, bathed in
tears, to beg his pardon for her contempt of his authority and fatherly
admonitions. She spent the days and nights in tears: and to repair the
scandal she had given by her crimes, she went to the parish church of
Alviano; with a rope about her neck, and there asked public pardon for
them. After this she repaired to Cortona, and made her most penitent
confession to a father of the Order of St. Francis, who admired the
great sentiments of compunction with which she was filled, and
prescribed her austerities and practices suitable to her fervor. Her
conversion happened in the year 1274, the twenty-fifth of her age. She
was assaulted by violent temptations of various kinds, but courageously
overcame them, and after a trial of three years, was admitted to her
profession among the penitents of the third Order of St. Francis, in
Cortona. The extraordinary austerities with which she punished her
criminal flesh soon disfigured her body. To exterior mortification she
joined all sorts of humiliations; and the confusion with which she was
covered at the sight of her own sins, pushed her on continually to
invent many extraordinary means of drawing upon herself all manner of
confusion before men. This model of true penitents, after twenty-three
years spent in severe penance, and twenty of them in the religious
habit, being worn out by austerities, and consumed by the fire of divine
love, died on the 22d of February, in 1297. After the proof of many
miracles, Leo X. granted an office in her honor to the city of Cortona,
which Urban VIII. extended to the whole Franciscan Order, in 1623, and
she was canonized by Benedict XIII. in 1728.