Stigmatized holy women as female Christs

This article examines the attempts to promote female stigmatics from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, and delineates the ways in which these challenged deeply-entrenched theological presumptions. In response to the claims that St. Francis (d. 1226) had been transformed into Christ at the time of His stigmatization, it argues, the supporters of Italian Dominican women mystics hailed them as incarnated female Christs, and even proposed that the miracle of their stigmatization surpassed that of the reception of the stigmata by the holy man St. Francis.