On August 17, 1308 the Augustinian nun Chiara of Montefalco died in the convent of Montefalco, which she presided over as abbess. She had been ill for many years and was of weak constitution and was well-prepared for death. She was surrounded on her deathbed by her religious sisters, two Franciscan friars, a priest, and her brother. Chiara was a woman of some importance. A renowned visionary, she was known for her ecstasies and was widely regarded as a living saint by those of her community. Hours before her death, she regained her energy, sat up, and conversed with her religious sisters before passing away in the seated position, as shown in the famous fresco painted years later in the convent chapel.
When she passed away, her nuns already considered her a saint and thus treated her body as a religious relic. They decided at once to embalm the body that it might be preserved. The embalming was done by the nuns in the presence of the town’s apothecary, who provided the nuns with balsam, myrrh, and other preservatives and served as a witness to the process. The details were recorded by one of the nuns, Sister Francesca, who wrote:
And after leaving the others, Sister Francesca of Foligno, who is now dead, and Illuminata and Marina and Elena, who is now dead, went to cut open the body, and the said Francesca cut it open from the back with her own hand, as they had decided. And they took out the viscera and put the heart away in a box, and they buried the viscera in the oratory that evening. (1)
The following day, the nuns decided to further explore Chiara’s body by dissecting the heart. What was the purpose of dissecting the heart? Here the testimony of Sister Francesca is important, for it reveals something about the way these medieval nuns viewed sanctity. Years later, at Chiara’s canonization trial, Sister Francesca said that the dissection of the heart was carried out because the sisters “believed they would find something wonderful” inside Chiara’s heart. (2) They did indeed find something wonderful. Francesca continues:
After vespers or therebouts, the said Francesca, Margherita, Lucia, and Caterina went to get the heart, which was in the box, as they later told the other nuns. And the said Francesca of Foligno cut open the heart with her own hand, and opening it, they found in the heart a cross, or the image of the crucified Christ. (3)
This was not all; further exploration of the heart revealed other Passion symbols, including the crown of thorns, nail, lance, and something that looked like a scourge.
But why did the nuns believe that “they would find something wonderful” inside Chiara’s heart? What line of thinking prompted them to consider searching inside the heart of the deceased abbess?
The nuns believed that if Chiara was truly as holy as they believed her to be, there would be some tangible, physically discernible sign of it within her heart. This was bound up with the medieval understanding of the heart and its importance. In the Middle Ages, the heart was considered the body’s principal, spiritual, and emotional core—the seat of the soul, intellect, and the locus of God’s divine activity. It was viewed as the “central organ” of the human being, representing the seat of emotions and the primary space for devotion and divine love. (4) If this were the case, then it was not unreasonable to assume that the indwelling of divine love would have produced empirically observable effects inside the heart. These strange objects were therefore taken as indisputable evidence of Chiara’s sanctity.
There was, however, a more particular reason for suspecting “something wonderful” in Chiara’s heart: some years earlier, Chiara had a vision in which Christ had placed a cross in her heart. Her official vita recorded this vision as follows:
The Lord Jesus Christ, in the form of a beautiful young man, clothed in white garments and carrying on his shoulder a cross in the same shape and size as the cross on which he was crucified, appeared to Chiara in prayer. And he said to her, “I am looking for a sturdy spot on which to set the cross, and I find here a suitable place on which to set it.” Then he added, “If you want to be my daughter, you must die on the cross.” (5)
After this vision, Chiara repeatedly spoke of having Jesus in her heart. This no doubt gave additional impetus to the nuns’ decision to open her heart as well as provided a context for understanding the strange objects found therein.
These discoveries naturally induced the nuns to probe further, and before long Chiara’s other organs were sliced open. The gallbladder was of particular interest. Sister Francesca relates:
Inside Chiara’s gallbladder there were three things that seemed to be round, so that they could not relax or rest until they knew what they could be. So they consulted with Master Simone of Spello [the monastery’s physician], in order to ask him if these objects could have been caused by some illness. And they placed the gallbladder in his hand so that he could open it up. He did not want to do this because, as he said, he did not feel himself worthy. So Francesca cut open the gallbladder, and found in it three small stones. (6)
The physician assured the nuns that there was no natural explanation for these stones. The nuns took these three stones to be a sign of the Blessed Trinity and further evidence of Chiara of Montefalco’s holiness.
Their conviction was only strengthened when Chiara’s disembodied heart began to work miracles, curing a man with a diseased leg and causing another who had mocked its power to wound himself with a brick. These miracles and the remarkable objects found inside her organs augmented Chiara’s reputation for holiness, culminating in her canonization proceedings of 1318 and 1319 under John XXII. For reasons unknown, Chiara’s canonization procedures stalled until her beatification under Clement XII in 1828 and canonization by Leo XIII in 1881. Today, St. Chiara’s mummified body can still be seen in Montefalco, along with her heart and the strange objects found in her organs.
Historian of science Katharine Park, in her excellent magnum opus on medieval dissection Secrets of Women, summarizes the importance of Chiara’s dissection in the context of high medieval views of the relationship between sanctity and the body:
In this related set of contexts, devotional, funerary, and medical, the opening of Chiara of Montefalco seems much less surprising than it did at first sight. Although unprecedented—it was the first documented case of a holy person whose internal organs were inspected and found to reveal corporal signs of sanctity—it was hardly unprepared. Inspired by Francis of nearby Assisi (d. 1226), who had received the stigmata of the Passion in the course of a religious vision, people had begun to look for external marks of sanctity in the bodies of holy men and women. The new practice of embalming by evisceration provided both a rationale and an opportunity to look for marks on internal organs as well. Chiara’s was the first of several such cases. (7)
(1) Quoted in Katharine Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origin of Human Dissection (Zone Books: New York, 2010), 41
(2) Ibid., 42
(3) Ibid., 41
(4) See Figueredo VM. “The Heart Renaissance.” Rev Cardiovasc Med. 2024 Mar 6;25(3):91.
(5) Life of Saint Clare of Montefalco, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell, ed. John Rotelle (Augustinian Press, 1999), 35
(6) Park, 41
(7) Ibid., 49
Phillip Campbell, “The Dissection of St. Chiara of Montefalco (1308)”, Unam Sanctam Catholicam, May 2, 2026. Available online at https://unamsanctamcatholicam.com/2026/05/03/the-dissection-of-st-chiara-of-montefalco-1308/