Lay Interventions and the Reshaping of Sacred Rituals and Space in 1520s Milan

On an Adventide Sunday in 1523, a visitor to Milan’s Duomo witnessed something unexpected. Lay congregants halted high mass by yelling at the priests, demanding that attention remain fixed on their favoured preacher. This and similar episodes are recounted in the Cronica Milanese by the shopkeeper Giovan Marco Burigozzo. Using Burigozzo’s accounts alongside overlooked evidence from the Duomo’s archives, this article traces moments when customary rituals broke down under lay intervention. Such episodes reveal how ordinary congregants experienced, contested and redirected the cathedral’s functions, reshaping the church’s sonic and liturgical space in ways that diverged from its intended purposes.