Ortolana

Ortolana, also known as Hortulana, was a noblewoman of Assisi in Umbria who lived in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. She belonged to one of the leading families of the city and was remembered in the earliest Franciscan sources for her piety and for the pilgrimages she made as a married woman. Traditional accounts, drawn from the Legend of Saint Clare and from testimony given at Clare's canonization process in 1253, relate that Ortolana traveled to the Holy Land, to the tombs of the Apostles in Rome, and to the shrine of Saint James at Compostela. These journeys reflect both the standing of her family and a personal devotion that later found expression in the enclosed life of the Poor Ladies.

She was the wife of Favarone Offreduccio, a knight of Assisi. The couple resided in a palazzo near the cathedral of San Rufino and had at least three daughters: Chiara (Clare), born in the mid-1190s; Caterina, who in religion took the name Agnes; and Beatrice. Hagiographical tradition records that before Clare's birth Ortolana received a vision or prophetic intimation that the child would be a light for many, an episode used to explain the name Chiara. The household was drawn into the early Franciscan movement when Clare left home in 1212 to follow Francis of Assisi; Agnes soon followed her sister.

After she was widowed, Ortolana herself entered the community that Clare had established at San Damiano, taking the habit of the Poor Ladies, later known as the Poor Clares. Her youngest daughter Beatrice likewise entered the same monastery. Ortolana thus spent her final years in the poverty, enclosure, and prayer that characterized the San Damiano community under Clare's leadership. She died at San Damiano; Franciscan tradition commonly assigns her death to the year 1238.

Ortolana has been venerated as Blessed within the Franciscan family, though she was never the subject of a formal papal canonization of the later medieval or modern type. Her memory is preserved principally through the thirteenth-century legends of her daughter Clare, the depositions of the canonization process, and subsequent Franciscan chronicles. Precise dates of her own birth and many details of her early life are not recorded in contemporary documents and remain unknown. She stands as an example of the noble matrons of central Italy who, after widowhood, embraced the new forms of penitential and enclosed life associated with Francis and Clare.