September 15th.  St. Catherine of Genoa.

She was born of a noble family near the historic North Italian port of Genoa in 1447 and married off at 16 to a husband who turned out to be mean, irascible, lecherous, unfaithful, and usually absent from home.  Nevertheless her persistent fidelity to him, and devotion to her faith, eventually achieved a change of heart in him (a process recorded in the life of several female saints towards their husbands, but never, it seems, the other way round).  In 1473 they moved to a humble abode and jointly devoted themselves to the sick; Catherine became matron of a hospital, putting her health at risk in a plague in 1493, and again in 1496, one year before her husband died.  After his death, she continued her spiritual quest but without becoming a Tertiary of one of the religious orders, as would have been customary at the time.  A contemplative and visionary, she shared her experiences with others through her writings (on Purgatory, and on the soul and the body).  She died in 1510 and was canonised in 1740.