Colette of Corbie

Daughter of a carpenter at the abbey of Corbie, born in 1381 and orphaned at eighteen, at twenty-one she had herself walled into a cell against her town's church, where she spent four years. She came out convinced that the order of Clare of Assisi must be given back the strict rule a century and a half of accommodation had softened. The plan required an authority no recluse has: she went to fetch it from Benedict XIII, one of the Avignon popes, who made her abbess of the houses that would adopt her reform. It then took her thirty years, refusals, convents that shut their doors and a reputation for fanaticism to found or reform seventeen monasteries. She died at Ghent in 1447; her branch, the Colettines, exists still.