Mary Magdalene de’ Pazzi is not often depicted in English church art, and there is no obvious reason for her to be commemorated in this location. The window is alongside depictions of St Edward and St Charles Borromeo, neither of whom make obvious companions for her. However, there is a devotion to her in Jesuit circles and the nearby Mapledurham House had family connections with the Jesuits.

Caterina de’ Pazzi was born in Florence in 1566. She belonged to a noble Florentine family, who were deeply religious. As a child, de’ Pazzi came into contact with many different aspects of the faith and received a good education. This solid foundation shows through clearly in her later life. She joined the Carmelite convent of Santa Maria degli Angeli when she was seventeen, in the same year that St Teresa of Avila died, and took the name of Mary Magdalene. This was a large convent, of more than 80 nuns, and unusual in some aspects of its life: the nuns received daily Communion, and there was a strong culture of engagement with the Scriptures. The nuns would listen to passages from the gospel while they were doing their daily work, and one of the older nuns would comment on what they had just heard.

Early on in her life in the convent, de’ Pazzi began to have mystical experiences. During these events she would often appear to her fellow nuns to have her attention fixed on something or someone that they were unable to see. She would speak passionately as though involved in a conversation, and from what she said, her sisters were able to identify these as conversations with God. She would move about, pick up objects, and put them down again and go from one room of the convent to another. De’ Pazzi herself never wrote anything about these experiences, but her sisters wrote down what they could about what she did and said during them.

After taking her vows as a nun, she had these experiences for forty successive days, and the window at Caversham depicts one of these. Her awareness of God’s love was so overwhelming that she picked up a small crucifix that was in her room, embraced it and spoke to Jesus: “Love, love, love, I will never stop calling you love. Love neither loved nor known by anyone. Oh my Love, joy of my heart; you are love.”

When reading about de’ Pazzi, it is striking how clear her ideas were about God. Even in those short sentences we can see how the biblical idea that God is love had become so deeply embedded in her thinking. Alongside this is her frustration that this love is so rarely recognised and difficult to identify in the world. During her experiences, these ideas came bubbling up inside her, so that she felt forced to express them. The way in which she did so is unique. She didn’t write works of theology like so many other saints. She didn’t write poetry like St John of the Cross, but instead she embodied these ideas in an almost theatrical way, and acted them out. This way of doing it made a great impression on her sisters, and is also a lively presence when we read about her today.

However, like many other mystics, she has often been misunderstood over the years. This usually happens by concentrating too much on the external aspects of her actions, and not paying enough attention to the definite ideas about God that she wanted to express through them. In her experiences she felt an overwhelming sense of God that became expressed in a particular way, driven by her own personality. She herself was never enthusiastic about the idea of her experiences being written down, and she managed to destroy some of the notebooks in which her sisters had done so. The important aspect for her was the reality of the God that she experienced. The way that it had been filtered through her personality, and then the record of what her sisters saw and heard, fell far short of that. Even worse, though, it placed the reader’s attention on her, and not on the God whose love she was expressing.

There is one other unusual aspect of this window. Most illustrations of this experience show de’ Pazzi embracing the cross, but with her eyes raised to heaven. At Caversham, though, her eyes are cast down, her attention fully on the figure of Jesus on the crucifix that she is embracing. Underneath the image there is a Latin quotation from 1 John 4:8, which in English reads: “Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.” What better summary is there of what St Mary Magdalene de’ Pazzi has to say to us today?

A selection of the accounts of de’ Pazzi’s experiences, written down by her fellow nuns, has been published in English under the title Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi: Selected Revelations, edited by Armando Maggi (Paulist Press, 2000).