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Biography

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Emilia Bicchieri was born in 1238 in Vercelli, in the Piedmont region of northern Italy, the seventh and youngest daughter of the nobleman Pietro Bicchieri. Her family belonged to the civic aristocracy of the commune and was associated with the Ghibelline faction in the partisan conflicts that marked thirteenth-century Italian city life. Raised amid wealth and local influence, she showed from childhood a strong inclination to prayer, fasting, and charity rather than to the marriage that would ordinarily have been arranged for a woman of her rank. After the death of her parents she came into a substantial inheritance, which she determined to devote to the religious life.

Around 1256 she used that fortune to found in Vercelli a monastery of nuns of the Order of Preachers, dedicated to Saint Margaret (Santa Margherita). She herself received the Dominican habit and entered the enclosed community she had established. Papal approval for the house was obtained during the pontificate of Alexander IV. Emilia was elected prioress on more than one occasion, though the tradition of her life stresses her reluctance to hold office and her preference for humble tasks. She sought to form the sisters in regular observance, the Divine Office, and the Dominican combination of contemplation and study, and she was remembered for gentleness in government as well as for personal austerity.

Hagiographical accounts, which are the principal surviving witnesses to her inner life, describe her as a mystic devoted especially to the Eucharist and as one who received visions of Christ and the Virgin Mary. She was also known for patience in illness and for generosity toward the poor of Vercelli. Historical sources for a thirteenth-century Italian nun are limited and largely pious in character; the outline of her noble origin, her foundation of a Dominican convent, her repeated service as prioress, and her death in her own monastery is nonetheless consistently attested in the tradition of the Order and of the church of Vercelli.

Emilia died in Vercelli on 3 May 1314 and was buried in the church of the monastery of Santa Margherita. Local veneration began soon after her death. In 1769 Pope Clement XIV confirmed her ancient cultus, and she has since been honored in the Catholic Church as Blessed Emilia Bicchieri, with her feast kept on 3 May. She was never the subject of a full modern canonization process and remains in the rank of the Blessed. Later suppressions of religious houses, including those of the Napoleonic period, disrupted the original community, but devotion to her continued in Vercelli and within the Dominican Order, where she is remembered as a foundress of contemplative Dominican life in her native city.

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