The Sacred and the Secular in Renaissance Florence

Seeking to heal people possessed by demons, stave off Lorenzo de’ Medici’s predations, and compete with the meteoric rise of Observant Mendicants — Franciscans and Dominicans — monks known as Vallombrosans performed multiple exorcisms in Florence and its countryside in the latter half of the fifteenth century. The accounts they wrote to publicize their efforts present an unusually lively survey of a little-studied sea change in late medieval religious life. In a religious landscape populated by Mendicant charlatans dressed as John the Baptist, concupiscent clerics, and pompous prelates, the Vallombrosans positioned themselves as committed to the decorous healing of Florentine peasants and nobles while weighing in on contemporary politics and claiming insight into Medici-related affairs such as the recent Pazzi Conspiracy. Yet traditional religious orders like the Vallombrosans and the Benedictines could not match the publicity, popularity, and secular political support garnered by Observant Mendicants in urban areas, and the latter’s ascendance left religion at the end of the fifteenth century looking very different from what it had at its beginning. By the century’s end, Observants predominated in influence, prestige, and patronage in cities across all of Europe. Sanctioning economic gain, addressing worldly moral dilemmas, and moving away from the older monastic focus on the dead and the afterlife, they shifted their focus to contemporary concerns. As over a traditional focus on communal life and monastic healing, Observants inaugurated individualistic forms of piety and fostered alternative forms of lay sociability and healing in the form of confraternities and urban hospitals.

This rich study of the forces which impelled a group of Florentine monks to perform exorcisms opens a kaleidoscopic window onto religious practice, political and religious entanglements, and a decisive shift in religious and political life that transformed the fifteenth century.

Introduction

Vallombrosa and its Historians
Observance and Reform; Political Flattery
Laxity and Reform; Creativity and Vitality
Observant Mendicancy
Country and City: Political Self-Fashioning
Method
Uniqueness and Representation: Historiographies of Exorcism
Publicity, Instrumentality, and Religious Conviction
Historiographies Sacred and Secular
‘Church-State’ Relations at Florence
Threats to Medieval Monasticism

Chapter 1. Exorcisms, Miracles, And Manuscripts: How Vallombrosans found their Calling

Recognizing Demoniacs
Vallombrosans and their Exorcisms

Chapter 2. Lorenzo De’ Medici: Commenda and Observant Reform, Conspiracy and Monastic ‘Decline’

Lorenzo and Commenda
Obeisance and Submission

Chapter 3: Internal Schism: Observance, Organization, and Reputation

Reform and Schism
The Shape of Reform
Undermining the Salvini

Chapter 4. Peasants, Mules, and City-Country Divides

City and Country
The Social Profile of a Rural Monastery
Vallombrosa and the Laity
Conversi
Vallombrosa’s Radical Beginnings
Laypeople, Clerics, and Observant Orthodoxy

Chapter 5. Observant Mendicants: Devotional Change and Religious Rivalry

Observance
Preaching
Theatrics and Spectacularity
Affect and Emulation
Observant Franciscans
Confraternities and Good Deaths
Augustinians
Dominicans

Chapter 6: Florence: Humanism, Fat Prelates, and Political Counsel

Civicism
Humanism
Florentinity and Peasant Culture
Religion at Florence: Traditional Saints
Fat Prelates and Murmuring Seculars: Florence’s Diocesan Church
Medici Devotions
Secular Control of the Countryside

Chapter 7. Restoring Order: Pastoralism, Statebuilding, and Peacemaking

Pastoral Care
Exorcism and Sin; Preaching by Proxy
Confession, Concupiscence, and Female Piety
Biblicism
Domestic Disruption
Discord and Resolution
From Family to Community
Peacemaking, Communal Distress and Violence

Chapter 8. Conclusions, Epilogues, and Legacies

The Politics of Religious Ritual: Lorenzo and Savonarola
Archives and the Future of Early Modern Studies

Appendix: Fifteenth-Century Exorcism Manuscripts

Bibliography

Index