Religion and Public Life in Late Medieval Italy c.1250-c.1450

The nature of relations between secular society and religious professionals of all sorts and at all levels is a pressing concern in contemporary public debate. A key element of this is when and why religious men and women intervene in public life and how this compares in different parts of the world. Whereas the modern press frequently emphasises tensions, recent historians of these issues in the society of medieval Italy have tended to underscore collaboration and cohesion. By looking at officeholding, this project will directly assess this approach. To do so, it will undertake the first extensive and comparative study of a particular case, the employment of religious professionals as salaried officeholders in secular administration in the cities of late medieval/early renaissance Italy. This was a widespread practice in many communes of the central and northern peninsula for over two hundred years, but has never before been subject to in-depth, comparative investigation. Yet the salaried employment of men who were committed by vows of poverty, chastity and obedience (and often to an enclosed life), subverted the traditional, and vigorously defended, norms of social and religious behaviour. This project sets out to explain why and how this came about, as a contribution to our understanding of relations between secular and religious at both individual and institutional levels.

The general aim of this project is thus to document the employment of religious in office as a means to understanding wider issues. By focussing on a sample of ten cities it will allow a series of broad concerns to be addressed: how were religious as officials selected, what was their function and how were relations between them, their communities and secular authorities negotiated? When and why did cities change from religious to lay officials or vice versa and with what effect? To answer these and many other subsidiary questions, comparisons will be drawn across the ten cities, chosen from different regions of the centre and north (it would overstretch the resources of the project to cover the south in this period which was a separate kingdom). This approach will allow us to establish the extent of variation and the extent to which cities copied each other, replicating statutes and practices. Equal weight will be given to the attitudes and activities of religious leaders and of secular elites, so as to show how far they approved or disapproved and how extensively long established ideas about separation between secular and lay society circulated. Finally this will allow us to refine our understanding of the construction of trust in the society of the communes.

This multi-faceted project has the potential to benefit a number of scholarly constituencies. By cutting across the usual boundaries within the historical discipline it will speak to historians of ecclesiastical and religious, as well as secular and social practices and ideas. A subsidiary study of the representation of monks as communal treasurers on the covers of account books in the city of Siena will address art historical evidence in a historical context. The project will result in a conference, an edited volume of essays, a peer-reviewed article, various conference papers and a PhD thesis on early fifteenth-century sermons concerned with the separation of secular and religious roles. The main output will be a monograph including city-by-city appendices listing religious orders or individuals employed and the urban offices they held. This will also highlight shifts from secular to religious office-holders or the opposite, thus allowing identification of moments when this issue was potentially critical. By comparing cities across different regions of Italy and making the raw data available in this way, the project will provide an important stimulus to and resource for further comparativework.