RICERCA ITALIANA     

Exchanges, the interaction of persons, the circulation of cultural models and symbolic interferences in religious, political and social life. Studies on Religious Orders in the late Middle Ages and in the Early Modern Age in Italy.

Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore

Abstract

The subject is the different ways of exchange of cultural models and the reciprocal symbolic interferences between religious orders and civil institutions of the Italian communes throughout the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age, with the purpose of discovering the rule of religious orders in the various institutional, political, social and cultural contexts. With the word “institution” we mean a social organization able to communicate in a symbolic way and to translate its own guiding ideas into laws and values, that is original concepts and values, that guarantee these institutions durability, legitimacy and the possibility of evolution in the continuity of their original principles. On the one hand we will examine the instruments and processes used by the religious to guarantee continuity to their initiatives even under change, making them stable and durably over time. This approach will help to see how the ruling political class of the towns takes possession of the same strategies of institutionalization and of communication with identical purposes, using them in the political field. The research intends to provide a new perspective in investigating the relationship between spirituality and institution with the aim of evaluating the contacts between the two dimensions and the wide range of their effects both on ideal guide-lines and on the practical realization of these.
The study of the ways of interaction between religion, the eclesiastical institutions of communes and political society, not to mention of the circulation of institutional models and governement practices of religious institutions on one hand and civil institutions on the other, will be articulated in three steps for
three geographical areas: a) the territory of the Lumbard towns in their evolution from communal city-state to territorial princedom (ex. dukedom of Milan); b) the regional state of the subalpine area, or rather the Sabaudian dukedom; c) an area including parts of Puglia and Basilicata, from the achievement of the Angevin monarchy to its decline, seen both from the perspective of the monarchy and that of cities. In all three topics it will be necessary to index the most exhaustive quantity possible of the archival contents with the goal of producing a census of the religious and eclesiastical centres. Research unit I will compare the institutions and institutional forms that govern religious orders to the directional and organizational models of political and social realities of Lumbard communal towns from the city-state form to the first experiments of princedom. Particular attention will be dedicated to the reciprocal exchange between the eclesiastical and lay culture, and especially their ways of communication. The topic of “symbolicness” will be the centre of the research, connected with the communicative role of the religious orders. Finally, the processes of exchange and of reciprocal interference of these symbols will also be carefully studied. RU II will investigate the relationships between religious and political spheres in Southern Italy (Puglia and Basilicata) in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth centuries, looking at the exchanges and the interferences between the religious and political. The presence of eclesiastics in central positions of power will be subject to in-depth analysis and their role as intermediaries in conflicts between the court and hinterlands of the reign. Even the ties in that context, between aristocracy and traditional monastic orders on the one hand and mendicant orders on the other will not be neglected. Moreover, the urban public spaces occupied by religious orders will be examined along with the symbolic value that this appropriation of space represents. RU III intends to analyze the interaction between religion, eclesiastic institutions and political society in the dukedom of Savoy in Fourteenth to the Sixteenth centuries, when the subalpine dominion of the dukes consolidated itself. <<<

Principal Investigator

Giancarlo Andenna Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore

Research Objectives

The subject is the different ways of exchange of cultural models and the reciprocal symbolic interferences between religious orders and civil institutions of the Italian communes throughout the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age, with the purpose of discovering the rule of religious orders in the various institutional, political, social and cultural contexts. With the word “institution” we mean a social organization able to communicate in a symbolic way and to translate its own guiding ideas into laws and values, that is original concepts and values, that guarantee these institutions durability, legitimacy and the possibility of evolution in the continuity of their original principles. On the one hand we will examine the instruments and processes used by the religious to guarantee continuity to their initiatives even under change, making them stable and durably over time. This approach will help to see how the ruling political class of the towns takes possession of the same strategies of institutionalization and of communication with identical purposes, using them in the political field.
Since the research aims at studying the ways of interaction between religious orders and civil institutions in Italy in order to clarify the role that secular eclesistics, monks and friars played in different political, social and cultural contexts with reference to the ways of circulation of models of institutionality, the first step will be the identification of the different typologies of eclesiastics and religious orders in three areas: subalpine, Lumbard and “Appulo-lucana” from Twelfth o Sixteenth centuries. The research will explore their provenance, social extraction, culture level, typology and characteristics of mobility, way of interaction from their original identity to that “acquired” in the new political, social and cultural context. The information gathered will lead to a mapping of the eclesiastical staff and to the drawing up of special prosopographic repertories.
Importance will be attributed to the reciprocal exchanges between lay culture and monastic and mendicant ones, with particular attention to the different ways of communication, found both through in the political speaches and in the forms of predication. Various phases of rationalisation, which found in the processes of composition and writing their privileged form of expression, may emerge from the comparison. The major indicators will be identified for evalutation of these forms of interference in the production and diffusion of cultural, ethical and behavioural models of the religious orders and of the communal institutions: methods of production and conservation of documents; relationship between predication of religious orders and political oratory; systems of values that religious orders introduced in Italian urban society through documents and public communication.
Particular attention will be dedicated to the topic of “symbolicalness”, connected to the comunicative dimension of religious orders and their propaganda. The exchange of symbols between the two fields, civil and religious, and the interferences that could happen only through the use of the same symbolic images with opposite meanings.
Clearly it will be necessary to distinguish between first level symbols, such as the crown, the crosier, the sceptre and the mitre, and second level ones, such as the contruction of buildings that embody the institutions and make them visible and long lasting, and guarantee their stability, or the creation of organizational and governamental structures, such as the general chapters and the “definers” of the religious orders, or the general councils and the smaller councils of the town sages or the councils that operated among the “seats” of the southern cities. The processes connected to the creation of public spaces, through the deliberations of urban courts, and to their semantization will be carefully investigated in the relationship between the eclesiastical and political world fulfilled through the construction of buildings and squares of particular symbolic significance. Also in this field we will adopt a comparative perspective that will consider particularly meaningful examples of the relationships established between the civic and eclesiastical spheres. <<<

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

The topic of the relationships between religious orders and Italian society has surely had considerable attention from medieval historiography since at least the late 1960’s. In the wake of studies that Jacques Le Goff conducted on French sources, we posed the problem of overcoming a history of religious orders concentrated only on internal events and on the figure of their founders, to delineate periods and ways of their multiple influences on Italian society. Such research was supported by the need to verify the validity of the hypothesis that the presence of Mendicant Friars in a medieval settlement represented a sign of its urban character and of its importance. These led to studies such as these of Luigi Pellegrini on the ways of settlement of Mendicants, or these of André Vauchez on the penetration of the Friars’ forms of piety among large segments of the lay urban population, particularly through the diffusion of the cult of “new” saints and preaching of a form of penitential piety from which came an impressive flowering of local initiatives like the brotherhoods studied, among others, by Giuseppina Gasperini.
Common denominator of this broad research thread was a more or less explicit preference for religious history, from which background the urban “society” always emerged as a reference horizon, in the sense of a fruitful meeting ground between the spiritual renovation promoted by the Mendicants and the widespread aspiration for a more fervid piety that characterised the protagonists of city life.
In some of these researches a sort of natural idiosyncrasy for the institutional dimension emerges, regarded as ineffective in understanding the amount of elements that would unfurl only outside of (when not actually contrary to) the traditional picture of the organisation of the care of souls of the diocese, of the pievi and parishes, and following schemes that leave aside an accurate project organisation. In the same way civil institutions remained in the background and particularly the institutions of the Comune, that came on the scene only as one of the components of a more complex and articulated urban society.
The research thread of Roberto Rusconi and Carlo Del Corno, based on medieval preaching, proved to be truly fruitful. These researches rarely encountered those on city political oratory, studied instead by Enrico Artifoni; who demonstrated that the study of the relations between these two forms of public communications opens up prospects of great historiographical interest.
Totally lacking, on the other hand, are studies which compare the methods of the monasteries and convents for the production and conservation of documents with those of urban Comuni, even if these two areas considered separately can depend on a quite consolidated tradition of studies in Italian diplomatics.
There also is an evident discrepancy between the large number of studies dedicated to the history of Mendicant Orders and the exiguous number of studies dedicated to Benedictine monasticism. This latter was considered for a long time as merely reduced to the rank of survival after their early medieval period, gripped in the anguishes of various “crisis” that would afflict its history in the full and late middle ages; the real importance of these crises are examined in recent studies of the Fourteenth century or on religious congregations such as the Camaldolites studied by Cecile Caby. These studies gave a more homogeneous view of the history of religious orders as a whole and of their relationships with the urban society.
Many studies exist on the organisation of ecclesiastic property in medieval Lombardy as well as on the economic situation of the ruling classes of the cities and the way of administering their landed property, but there are also studies on the economy of the “Lombard” towns and of the rural Comuni of the same area in the Comunal age; consider the studies of François Menant and the Annali della Storia d’Italia (volumes 1 &amp; 6), respectively entitled Dal Feudalesimo al Capitalismo (1978) and Economia naturale e economia monetaria (1983). There have also been particular studies by Cinzio Violante on monasteries and chapters, in the development of monetary economy up until the Thirteenth century, and by Giorgio Chittolini on the crisis of ecclesiastic property in the late middle ages. Nevertheless, although there are partial studies on the process of organisation and economic administration of the estates of the great families of the cities and of the monasteries of traditional country orders, with precise reference to the various forms of sustenance, drawn by the monks from land directly worked by monastic lay brothers or paid workers, or rented unit by unit to farmers, little study has been done on the passage towards less profitable forms of global assignment of the management of property to lay managers. These aspects, that concerned almost all the monasteries of the various orders, have been little studied, particularly analysing and comparing the archival documents of the Coenobies with those of the orders, especially from the Statutes and from decisions of the General Chapters.
The Angevin age has a fundamental importance for understanding the evolution in modern age of Southern Italy. In this perspective many studies have inquired the various appearance of the two centuries of Angevin government with the tendency to identify in the religious orders a simple instrument of government, if not of oppression; often the political and ideological prejudgment has not allowed to pick the reasons of coherence between orders and requirements of the society, that can explain the longevity and wealth of the southern religious experiences. The serious losses of the Archives of Neapolitan State have marked an ulterior block in proceeding of the studies, still more sensitive for the religious ones; this has implied a lacked renewal of the research second the widest tendency delineated in the relative studies to the religious orders. We think at studies of the relationships with laical world, confraternal and charitable activity, monastic settlement choices, the positive contribution of the ecclesiastical institutions, but also to the most recent attention towards the monachism in low-medieval age, with an overcoming of the simplistic judgment of one uniform and unavoidable crisis. In the last decade it has been recorded more decided awakening of the studies on the Angevin world of which they are testimony the roman Convention on the “Etat angevin. Pouvoir, cultures et société entre XIIIe et XIVe siècle”, organized by the American Academy in Rome, the Ecole française de Rome, the Istituto Storico Italiano, the U.M.R. Telemme and the University of Provence, the University of Naples "Federico II", and the Convention in Bari in 2002 dedicated to the Norman and Souabe Inheritances in the Angevin age. In these revival of the Angevin age we point out the researches of C.D. Fonseca, G. Vitolo and their groups of search on laics, eremitic and beggars forms and relationship with urban world; still those of H. Houben on the monastic and knights orders; but also, with different perspective, studies on relationships between religious orders, Monarchy and the celebration of the power lead from J.-P. Boyer. A part of the wealth of the research perspectives is delineated also in the actions of the Convention of Angers in 2000, “Formation intellectuelle et cultures du clergé dans les territoires angevins (milieu du XIIIe-fin du XVe siècle), published in 2005. It must however consider that these studies still developed the tendency to concentrate the attention on the capital of southern Italy; from this line researches like those of Houben and Fonseca bear away, and also a part of the group of Vitolo, with the attempt to extend surveying also on the other city of the Reign. For this us it seems still more fruitful to invert the optical and to watch from the regional observatory the mechanisms of the relationships between the monarchie and truths, through the privileged lens of the religious orders.
The topic of UR is therefore the connections between Religion and Government institutions, intended as an important key to understanding the making of the States during the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age both in and out of Italy. It is a subject that has an extensive bibliography which agrees to consider the connection between religion and politics as one of main factors of the statual building. Among most recent studies in Europe it is necessary to cite at least the researches of André Vauchez on the connections between Mendicant Orders and communal Italian Cities, of Georges Minois on the functions and the behaviour of confessors as directors of the consciences of the France kings, or of Gabor Klaniczay on dynastic cults in medieval central Europe; in Italy, the suggestions maked by the volume of “Storia d’Italia. Einaudi” have been improved by the researches of Remo Guidi and Gabriella Zarri, of Roberto Rusconi on late medieval prophetism, and the extensive discussion by Marino Berengo on the connection between religion and society in his L’Europa delle città; most recently and in a comparative perspective, the volume Ordini religiosi e società politica in Italia e Germania nei secoli XIV e XV, edited by Giorgio Chittolini and Kaspar Elm, had gone back on the same theme. Giorgio Chittolini again has given an important speech on this subject, now published in the volume Girolamo Savonarola da Ferrara all’Europa.
Although North and central Italy (mainly Tuscany, Veneto, Lombardy, Emilia) has a rich corpus of researches on relationship between religion and politics, nevertheless Piedmont is still on the sidelines of the sparkling historiographic discussion developped on these topics by Italian and European scholars.
Between 14th and 16th centuries, the State of Savoy grows up across Western Alps as an aggregation of communities, of seigneurial dominions, finally of cities too; while this State is widely studied in the eyes of his social and political institutions, it is still greatly unexplored regarding religious life, Church institutions, religious Orders, sacred spaces, pious lay societies, languages of religious “propaganda” and “cura animarum”. Some important studies of Grado Giovanni Merlo, Rinaldo Comba, Giorgio Cracco regarding specific dioceses, orders, convents or prominent personalities are still too much sporadic and occasional.
The urgency of this new direction in the research is justified by the growing control exercised by the princely authority on local powers, in the process of making and consolidation of the State in the late medieval age, not only at a juridical and institutional level, but also at a ideological-religious one. It is well-known, in particular, the impact of the Decreta sabaudiae on the making a “coercivly Christian” State (R. Comba) such as the Savoy dukedom starting from the years of Amedeo VIII. The religious language translates the making of a “homogeneous society” (G. Castelnuovo) by the Prince.
Instead, since time this topic is well studied in the Swiss side of the Ancient State by the équipe of Agostino Paravicini Bagliani in the University of Losanna. Recently, the French side too of the Ancient State of Savoy begins to set up research projects mainly on Dukes chapel in Chambery, served by Franciscan friars. Further cultural exchanges are in process between the UR coordinator and the interdisciplinary project “Histoire des Savoirs” (CNRS) of the University Lyon 2.
Therefore, as a cross-border context, the subalpine area builds its own regional identity through the continuos exchanges between different social and cultural domains, however correlated. This feature comes out from an important historiographical tradition that – in Piedmont – has especially inquired into the phenomenon of the mobility of men and ideas along the lines of communication. This phenomenon holds some prominent peculiarities starting from Fifteenth century, when the supremacy of Savoy Counts (then Dukes) comes out in the “subalpine” area. Since this moment, chiefly during the ducal period, the mobility of men and ideas becomes an essential element in the process of nation-making and consolidation of dynastic prestige, as it is demonstrated by the recall at the ducal court of officials, intellectuals and artists. These are the research subjects of both Alessandro Barbero about the existence in the State of Savoy of two different state models (French and Italian), and Guido Castelnuovo and Irma Naso about the Court and University staff mobility. On the contrary, other topics remains still unexplored: the ecclesiastical and religious mobility, the presence and role in the power system either central (the Court, the Bureaucracy, the University), or local (the urban consilia, the chapter of the cathedral and episcopal curia, the conventual studia) of ecclesiastical “staff” coming from political, familiar and geographical contexts (Italians and Europeans) different from where they move. In this scheme, the ecclesiastic “staff” becomes an essential member, since promoter of a “shared identity”, which grows up through the meeting between its own geographical and cultural originality and the sense of belonging to the fortunes of the dukedom. <<<