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Biography

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Andrew Corsini was born in 1302 in Florence, then the capital of a powerful Italian republic, into the noble Corsini family. Traditional accounts name his parents as Niccolò Corsini and Gemma degli Stracciabendi. Hagiographers relate that before his birth his mother dreamed she had brought forth a wolf that turned into a lamb, a story later read as a prophecy of his early wildness and later conversion. In his youth he followed the pleasures and factional habits of the Florentine nobility and led a disorderly life. After a conversion that sources attribute to his mother's prayers and to a sudden realization of his conduct, he entered the Carmelite convent in Florence while still a young man, taking the habit of the Order of the Brothers of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel.

He was ordained a priest and sent to study, spending periods in Paris and at Avignon, where the papacy then resided. He became known for preaching, personal austerity, and the guidance of souls, and he served as prior of the Carmelite house in Florence. In 1349 Pope Clement VI named him bishop of Fiesole. Corsini is said to have tried to escape the appointment by hiding, but he was found and consecrated. As bishop in the mid-fourteenth century he worked to reform clergy and laity, to visit the parishes of a small but troubled diocese, and to relieve the poor. Tuscany in his lifetime was repeatedly shaken by plague, by conflict between Guelph and Ghibelline parties, and by feuds among leading families; Corsini gained a reputation as a mediator who reconciled enemies in Fiesole and Florence.

Later in his episcopate he was employed by the Holy See as a legate. Pope Urban V sent him to Bologna to help restore peace in that city, a mission that further established his name as a peacemaker. Medieval and early modern lives credit him with miracles of healing and of aid to the destitute, though these reports belong to the pious tradition surrounding his cult. He died in Fiesole on 6 January 1374, the feast of the Epiphany. He was first buried in the cathedral of Fiesole. Reports of miracles at his tomb spread quickly, and his fellow Carmelites and the Corsini family promoted his memory.

Pope Eugene IV, in 1440, approved the public cult of Andrew Corsini, an act treated as beatification. Pope Urban VIII canonized him on 22 April 1629. In the following decades the Corsini family built a richly decorated chapel in the Carmelite church of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence, where his relics were enshrined and where they remain an object of veneration. His feast was kept on 4 January in the General Roman Calendar from the seventeenth century until the reform of 1969; the Carmelite Order observes it on 9 January. He is invoked as a patron of Fiesole and of Florence, as a patron of diplomats, and against riots and civil disorder.

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