Biblioteca Statale di Lucca, MS 3540 (olim Phillipps MS 8831) is a vellum manuscript, most likely of the third quarter of the fifteenth century, with two distinctive illustrations (fols. 122v and 148v), the first a Man of Sorrows and the second a fine coloured drawing of the saint herself (fig. 8.1). Its contents are entirely in Latin. It begins with the pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditationes vite Christi and ends with the material on Santa Zita to be described here. In between are prayers, short treatises, and excerpts from treatises and sermons (including material by the Englishmen Robert Grosseteste, Richard Rolle, and Stephen of Sawley). At the end of the Meditationes (fol. 122r) the scribe has written what appears to be a coded notice of his name (perhaps John Combe).

The manuscript was not prepared for a female readership (its Latinate content precludes that), but there is a markedly affective and female bias, not only in prayers to the Virgin and the Stephen of Sawley treatise on her fifteen joys, but in the Revelations of St Mechthild and the Zita material. A prayer invoking the passion of Christ (fol. 123r) asks for the intercessions of the Virgin, her mother St Anne, and Sts Katherine, Margaret, Cecilia, Zita (‘Citha’) and Faith ‘cum omnibus sanctis et electis tuis’.

It will be clear from the Lucca manuscript alone that Santa Zita was known in England in the Middle Ages. Caroline Barron has written on the means by which the cult came to England and has provided valuable information on its spread, perhaps from London in the fourteenth century, where the church of St Benet Sherehog was known as that of ‘St Sithe’ (1356) and the church of St Andrew, Holborn had a successful fraternity dedicated to her (1394). The establishment in England of the cult of Zita (although always referred to as a saint, she was not canonized until 1696) was most likely due to the dual influence of Italian merchants living in London (specifically, Luccan merchants, since Italian saints and cults were very localized) and clerics travelling to and from Rome via Lucca. There is perhaps particular reason to associate the cult with the Benedictine abbey of Bury St Edmunds, which had early (eleventhcentury) links with Lucca through the Duomo, San Martino, which housed the ‘Volto Santo’, the great wooden image of Christ.