Caterina de' Pazzi was born to the great Florentine banking family of the Pazzi (descendants of the conspirators against Lorenzo de' Medici a century earlier) and educated at the Cavaliere di Malta convent. At sixteen she entered the small Carmelite convent of Santa Maria degli Angeli in the Borgo San Frediano in Florence, taking the religious name Maria Maddalena.
Her mystical life was one of the most intense and most thoroughly documented in early modern Catholic history. From age twenty her ecstatic experiences — often lasting hours, sometimes days — were recorded verbatim by attendant sisters at her superior's order; the resulting seven volumes of transcripts form one of the foundational documents of Catholic mystical literature. She suffered also long periods of intense interior darkness and demonic temptation, alternating with periods of ecstatic union, throughout the twenty-five years of her religious life.
She held all the major offices of the small Carmelite community (mistress of novices for sixteen years, sub-prioress for three) despite her recurring physical incapacity. Her body became progressively shrunken and tubercular through her last decade. She died at the convent on May 25, 1607. Her body was placed beneath the altar of the convent church (now the Monastery of Santa Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi at Borgo Pinti in Florence) where it has remained incorrupt for over four centuries. Canonized 1669.