Afterlives

In 1903, the Vatican’s secretary of state, Cardinal Mariano Rampolla was heir apparent to the papacy. But he became unexpectedly out of a job due to a veto by the Austro-Hungarian emperor. Rampolla retreated to a life of scholarship to edit a manuscript he had discovered in a monastic library decades earlier, Gerontius’s Life of Melania the Younger. Rampolla’s publication spawned a series of early twentieth-century reactions to Melania’s biography. This work sometimes appeared in scholarly journals. Much appeared in popular press articles such as one that compared Melania’s fasts to those of early twentieth-century suffragettes’ or a series of newspaper headlines referring to “the richest woman in the history of the world!” The hagiography also inspired early twentieth-century imitations, such as Sainte Mélanie, a pious and expanded version of Melania’s Life. This chapter examines an earlier rediscovery of this “indomitable little saint” who was seen as “Richer than Rockefeller.”