A People’s Church: Medieval Italy and Christianity, 1050–1300

Coedited by Agostino Paravicini Bagliani and Neslihan Şenocak, A People’s Church is a stimulating volume of essays intended to give its readers an overview of the scholarship on medieval Christian culture on the Italian peninsula. As might be anticipated from its title, it is not your father’s church history focused tightly as it might have been decades ago on the institutional church, its clerics, and its administration. Instead, it aims to examine a wide array of voices, not always in harmony, including churchmen, yes, but also those of lay women and men, heretics and saints, Greek and Latin rite worshippers, and in a welcome move, in the case of one essay, Jews and Muslims residing within the hegemonic Christian society of medieval Italy.The editors have solicited thirteen essays from an array of prominent international scholars in the field, including Paravicini himself (with Pietro Silanos) and Şenocak, alongside Maureen Miller, Cécile Gaby, Marina Gazzini, Antonio Rigon, Giovanna Casagrande, Antonella degl’Innocenti, Maria Pia Alberzoni, Frances Andrews, George Dameron and Giovanni Vitolo. Since an explicit goal of the volume is to present Italian scholarship (often published as articles rather than monographs) to Anglophone audiences, the contributions are heavily weighted toward Italian-language scholars, here in translation. After an informative historiographical introduction by the coeditors, the topics examined address familiar themes in the literature, including the papacy and Italian politics, bishops, baptismal parishes and pastoral work, monasticism, lay and clerical confraternities, mendicants, saints, heresy, and urban religion. The collection closes with two cases studies: one focused on Florence, the other on Naples. The essays are synthetic, meant to provide historical introductions. They also serve as snapshots that encase in the amber of print the state of the field in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. In the case of a few of them, they also suggest future directions of study.Although the editors did not charge the contributors to write essays based on original research—nor was it required of authors to employ new theoretical models—what is refreshing about this collection is that a few of the medievalists attempt to innovate by applying new frameworks to their topics. They do so either by using the rubric of medieval Christian culture to bridge the yawning gulf that often divides the scholarship (and everything else) on northern and southern Italy to make fruitful comparisons. Or they refocus our analytical lenses to expand traditional horizons. Because the space of a review such as this one is limited, I focus here on three essays that, in my view, do one, the other, or both at once.“Bishops” by Maureen Miller ranges fluidly over northern and southern Italy by examining the episcopate through three central characteristics: the number of episcopal sees, their resources, and their proximity to the papacy. It will come as no surprise to find that the smallest dioceses were located in the south, but perhaps counterintuitively that led to more southern archbishoprics than in northern Italy. Nor is it surprising to read about the wealth gaps between northern and southern sees, but the comparison is eye-popping. According to Miller’s calculations, 87.5 percent of the poorest sees were in southern Italy. The patriarchate of Aquileia, the North’s most wealthy see, had a per annum income that was four hundred times greater than the poorest see in Calabria. Miller also shows how shared proximity to Rome could be both a blessing and a curse for Italian bishops—both North and South. Being close to the papacy meant that Italian bishops often dominated the papal synods and councils and could obtain papal privileges more easily than those from more distant regions, but it also meant the papacy’s claims to overlordship in disputed territories could more easily result in direct military intervention in those areas. Miller’s comparative approach is both consistently well drawn and instructive.Maria Pia Alberzoni’s essay on heresy is also comparative in that her scope encompasses the usual suspects, but the essay also frames Italy’s heresies in a broader transnational context. That is, to take one example, she shows what Italian Catharism had in common with its counterpart in France. She notes, for instance, that the Catharism of southern France “adhered to a radical dualism” (273), as did the Catharism on Lake Garda, while Cathar communities near Milan, Mantua, and Vincenza, like those in northern France, were more moderate. From this brief example, it will perhaps be apparent that she dismisses the revisionist work of the late R. I. Moore and Mark Pegg, who each has attempted to show that Catharism was a delusion in the first place of feverish inquisitors and subsequently of naïve historians who have imbibed the former’s particular brand of poison. For Alberzoni, the analyses of Moore and Pegg might have benefited had they considered the Italian evidence and historiography.Though Frances Andrews doesn’t reject the utility of the concept of “civic religion,” an analytical lens first put forward by David Herlihy in his work on Pistoia, which since then has enjoyed great currency in the historical literature, she very usefully retools the concept as “urban religion.” She argues that it is a “more capacious framework” (299), one not straightjacketed by the interests of social and political elites. Building on Robert Orsi’s definition of “urban religion” (developed to analyze contemporary American religious culture), which he delineates as “the site of converging and conflicting visions and voices, practices and orientations,” emerging from “many different people who have come to cities by choice or compulsion (or both) and who find themselves intersecting with unexpected others”(303), Andrews transplants the concept to medieval Italy. Thus, under one rubric, she can discuss the lived religion of all stripes of laity (male and female, pious and impious, heterodox and orthodox), clergy and religious, and, significantly, how Jews and Muslims were entangled with their Christian neighbors. Like Miller, Andrews ventures south to shed a ray of light on a Greek religious community in Palermo (Vitolo spotlights the Greek rite Christians in his essay about Naples too) and uncovers a tiny Greek rite community in central Italy as well. Her conceptual category of “urban religion” helps us to understand how the overarching Latin Christian culture of medieval Italy in fact contained multitudes.The editors envision that A People’s Church will find an audience primarily comprised of graduate students who might require introductory material covered in this volume. As an instructor who has taught courses on Italy and medieval religion, I can imagine assigning some of these essays to an advanced undergraduate class or a graduate seminar. On that basis alone the editors have admirably filled a niche. It will now join Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, edited by Roberto Rusconi and Daniel Bornstein (University of Chicago Press, 1996), in my very small collection of books that have endeavored to bring Italian scholarship on medieval religion to an anglophone audience. In this case, we have the added benefit of having a group of international scholars join the conversation.