Angeline of Marsciano

Angeline of Marsciano, known also as Angelina of Montegiove and in the world as Angelina Corbara, was a member of the Umbrian nobility who became a Franciscan tertiary and the foundress of a congregation of sisters of the Third Order Regular of Saint Francis. Reliable sources do not agree on the year of her birth: some place it in 1357 and others in 1377. She was born at Montegiove, a fortified settlement in Umbria then within the Papal States, and belonged to the Corbara family, who held the title of counts of Marsciano. In accordance with the practice of her rank she was married while still young to a nobleman identified in the tradition as Giovanni, Count of Civitella. The marriage lasted only a short time. After her husband's death she declined further alliances and chose consecrated widowhood, a path that allowed a woman of her class to retain a degree of independence while dedicating herself to prayer and charity.

In the last years of the fourteenth century she took the habit of the Franciscan Third Order and began to gather other women, many of them likewise widows of the regional nobility, who wished to live a common religious life without entering a fully cloistered monastery. Around 1397 she established at Foligno a community of such tertiaries. The sisters followed a Franciscan rule in community, yet they were not bound by papal enclosure. That arrangement, unusual for women religious in her day, permitted them to go out to care for the sick, to help the poor, and to perform other works of mercy in the town. Foligno, already associated with Franciscan spirituality, became the mother house of a new form of female tertiary community. The combination of common life with active charity distinguished her foundation from both the enclosed Poor Clares and the purely secular tertiaries who remained in their own homes.

Angeline founded further houses of the same type in Umbria and in neighboring parts of central Italy; later tradition credits her with some fifteen convents. The novelty of unenclosed sisterhoods provoked resistance. Families of the nobility sometimes objected to the influence she exercised over young women who might otherwise have been married, and some churchmen regarded the absence of enclosure as irregular or dangerous. Hagiographical narratives speak of accusations and of her having to justify her way of life before ecclesiastical authority, though the precise course of these disputes is not securely documented. In time the congregation obtained recognition and continued its work. Angeline spent her final years at Foligno, governing the network of communities from the original house. She died there on 14 July 1435 and was buried in her monastery.

Veneration of Angeline remained local and Franciscan for centuries. On 8 March 1825 Pope Leo XII confirmed her ancient cult, an act that in the canonical practice of that period constituted beatification. She has not been canonized and is therefore styled Blessed. Franciscans keep her feast on 13 July; other calendars have used nearby dates in mid-July. The sisters who trace their origin to her Foligno community have been known as the Franciscan Sisters of Blessed Angelina or as members of the Third Order Regular of Saint Francis. She is remembered as a pioneer of an active, unenclosed form of Franciscan sisterhood in late medieval Italy and as a representative of the strong tertiary movement among Umbrian women of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.