The importance of ‘The Everlasting Gospel’ lies principally in its influence on the Franciscan order, but it had several other developments which are of distinct interest as remarkable illustrations of the strange fanaticisms and superstitious credulities possible in the thirteenth century. The Joachite idea of a new era and new religion led to the astonishing discovery of incarnations of the divine. One was found in a certain woman, a native of Milan, called Guglielma, who seemed to have been in no way remarkable save for her piety.[53] Yet the little band of followers who gathered round her came to venerate her as a saint and a miracle worker. The biographies of mediæval worthies are full of tales of the miraculous, and there was nothing strange in this. But the extraordinary absurdity followed of finding her to be the Holy Ghost in female form. The woman herself never countenanced such fantastic ideas and expressly repudiated any supernatural powers. But after her death a small circle of fanatic devotees established her worship in Milan with a certain Maifreda at their head, performing high sacerdotal functions and destined in the eyes of her associates to succeed to the papal throne when the corrupt Roman Church should have passed away. The Guglielmites were a very insignificant sect, easily extinguished. Potentially more dangerous were the followers of one Gherardo Segarelli, a very ignorant and very demented enthusiast of Parma, who, being rejected on his seeking admission into the Franciscan order, determined to outdo St. Francis in the exact reproduction of the life of Christ.[54] His method of accomplishing this purpose was to have himself circumcised, wrapped in swaddling clothes and suckled by a woman—after which preliminaries he stalked into the streets of his native town, a wild, uncouth figure, calling all men to repentance. In time the madman succeeded in attracting devotees from among herdsmen as ignorant and almost as foolish as himself. The movement began to be formidable when it spread beyond Parma, even beyond Italy, being found in 1287 in Germany; and it appeared that Segarelli aimed at proselytizing the world. The papacy was roused, the Inquisition put into action, Segarelli himself in 1300 burnt in Parma, his disciples, known as Apostolic Brethren, energetically persecuted.