My research focused upon the arguments used by Dominican and Franciscan authors about the legitimacy of the representation of stigmata. These arguments were first set out in a well-known work by Tommaso Caffarini in the early fifteenth century, but the debate continued through to the early seventeenth century and the later contributions have received little scholarly attention. I therefore expanded the parameters of my research beyond the originally envisaged mid-sixteenth-century cut-off point. Vincenzo Giustiniani, writing in the second half of the sixteenth century, and Gregorio Lombardelli, writing at the beginning of the seventeenth century, both Dominicans, put forward arguments in favour of a wide interpretation of stigmata and supported the representation of saints with stigmata. This is in spite of the fact that the most famous Dominican stigmatic, Catherine of Siena (ob. 1380), had invisible stigmata. Both authors, therefore, dealt with the issue of depicting the invisible in visual art. Antonio Daza, a Franciscan writing in the early seventeenth century, argued for a restricted definition of stigmata, allowing only Saint Francis as a true stigmatic and, therefore, the only saint who legitimately could be represented as such. Further, Daza discussed the definition of Francis's stigmata as miraculous, thus involving him in a consideration of contemporary understanding of wound pathology.

That this rich strand of debate between Dominican and Franciscan authors, which centred on the definition of stigmata and the representation of the miracle in the visual arts, was ongoing until the early seventeenth century is well known and has been explored by, for example, Lydia Bianchi and Diega Giunta, who focused on Catherine of Siena. However, the intricacies of the debate and the ways in which it drew on contemporary thinking about visual art and medical knowledge have not been explored.

In order to situate the arguments of these Dominican and Franciscan authors, I also looked at a range of saints' lives for those saints who were reputed to have had stigmatic symptoms. These included Rita of Cascia (ob. 1457), Eustochia da Messina (ob. 1491), Juana de la Cruz (ob. 1534) and Maria Raggi (ob. 1600), in addition to those on whom I had already conducted research (Osanna da Mantua (ob. 1505), Stefana Quinzani (ob. 1530) and Lucia Brocadelli da Narni (ob. 1544)).

By investigating these texts in detail it has become apparent that the debate on the definition of stigmata and the representation of stigmatics was one that changed in response to religious and medical understanding as well as to contemporary thinking about visual art.