[4] Catherine and her teaching were the subject of Baron Friedrich von Hügel's classic work The Mystical Element of Religion (1908).

[9] The marriage turned out wretchedly:[8] it was childless and Giuliano proved to be faithless, violent-tempered and a spendthrift, and he made his wife's life a misery.

[9] After ten years of marriage,[10] she was converted by a mystical experience during confession on 22 March 1473; her conversion is described as an overpowering sense of God's love for her.

[8] She began to receive Communion almost daily, a practice extremely rare for lay people in the Middle Ages, and she underwent remarkable mental and at times almost pathological experiences, the subject of Friedrich von Hügel's study The Mystical Element of Religion.

[9] For about 25 years, Catherine, though frequently going to confession, was unable to open her mind for direction to anyone; but towards the end of her life a Father Marabotti was appointed to be her spiritual guide.

[4] Her authorship of these has been denied, and it used to be thought that another mystic, the Augustinian canoness regular Battistina Vernazza, a nun who lived in a convent in Genoa from 1510 till her death in 1587, had edited the two works.

This suggestion is now discredited by recent scholarship, which attributes a large part of both works to Catherine, even though they received their final literary form only after her death.

[6] Her writings also became sources of inspiration for theologians such as Robert Bellarmine and Francis de Sales as well as Cardinal Henry Edward Manning.