Legenden von der Heiligen Zita und Dienstbotengeschichte

Raffaella Sarti, Zita’s legend and servants’ history A Filipino TV series of the 1960s whose main characters were a good and a bad maid and an Italian medieval mummy kept in Lucca (Italy): these apparently unrelated items are in fact related. The mummy is that of Saint Zita, a 13th -century holy maid. The Filipino programme (developed by a Jesuit) was entitled “Santa Zita and Mary Rose” and may be seen as one of the numerous narratives inspired by Zita’s story. Thus, after showing consistencies and inconsistencies between the results of the study of the mummy and the first medieval life of the saint, the article focuses on the manipulation of the medieval legend (which reflects pauperistic values) over more than eight centuries. According to it, Zita often neglected her domestic duties in order to pray or go on pilgrimages, and even gave alms, without permission, from her master’s goods. Nevertheless, from the Counter-Reformation onwards, Zita was increasingly used to provide maids with a model to follow, and she was increasingly represented as an ideal servant, loyal and obedient. She was also increasingly presented as the patron of maids, to the point that in 1955 the Pope proclaimed her as such. This evolution had to do both with the feminisation of domestic service and the growing interests of the Church in (lower class) women in order to guarantee social conservation or even restoration. On the other hand, the fact that, in many countries, Catholic people such as the Filipinas/os were/are well represented among the ‘new’ domestic workers may not be casual: the Catholic Church, indeed, plays/ed an important role in facilitating the meeting of supply of, and demand for, domestic labour on a global scale.