The saints’ Lives in this book were written in Italy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Here translated into English and in full for the first time, they shed light on the ways in which both lay men and women sought God in the urban environment, and how they were understood and described by contemporaries. Only one of these saints (Homobonus of Cremona) was formally canonised by the Pope: the others were locally venerated within the communities which had nurtured them. Raimondo Palmario of Piacenza, contemporary with Homobonus, was remembered as both pilgrim and a vigorous exponent of practical charity. The nobleman Andrea Gallerani of Siena turned from a life of violence to good works, while another Sienese, the holy comb-seller Pier Pettinaio, exemplified the godly business man who insisted on the just price and on paying his taxes. Two very different women are included: Umiliana de’Cerchi of Florence, a widow with children, and the ‘servant-saint’ Zita of Lucca. The last of the Lives contains a bishop's account of how the cult of the humble Rigo was launched in Treviso in 1315. The book will welcomed by students and other readers interested in medieval Italian cities during this period of growth and vitality, and in how the religious life was lived in urban settings.

This book provides the first translation into English of the Latin biographies of nine holy men and one archangel who became the patron saints of the areas where they evangelized, documenting the conversion of pagan Roman Italy to Christianity at the dawn of the Middle Ages. These Lives or Passions recorded for early medieval audiences the difficulties their local patron saints encountered in promoting the new religion, and their sufferings at the hands of resistant pagans and Roman authorities -- ordeals that qualified these saints as special protectors or guardians over their cities or regions. Full of tales of courage, torture, assistant angels, mischievous devils, dragons, and monsters, these earliest Lives also served as literary and devotional touchstones for later elaborations, medieval and modern, on the saints? lives, careers, and cults. With a comprehensive introduction and historical commentary to each biography, Patron Saints of Early Medieval Italy provides new evidence for understanding the transition from the ancient Roman world to the Middle Ages. In assessing the technical problems relating to the origin and date of composition of each text, Patron Saints also contributes to redeeming these valuable but neglected sources for the history of medieval Italy. It also discusses the historical and literary significance of these biographies within the contexts of hagiography as a literary genre and early medieval religious life.

In Suspect Saints and Holy Heretics Janine Larmon Peterson investigates regional saints whose holiness was contested. She scrutinizes the papacy's toleration of unofficial saints' cults and its response when their devotees challenged church authority about a cult's merits or the saint's orthodoxy. As she demonstrates, communities that venerated saints increasingly clashed with popes and inquisitors determined to erode any local claims of religious authority. Local and unsanctioned saints were spiritual and social fixtures in the towns of northern and central Italy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In some cases, popes allowed these saints' cults; in others, church officials condemned the saint and/or their followers as heretics. Using a wide range of secular and clerical sources—including vitae, inquisitorial and canonization records, chronicles, and civic statutes—Peterson explores who these unofficial saints were, how the phenomenon of disputed sanctity arose, and why communities would be willing to risk punishment by continuing to venerate a local holy man or woman. She argues that the Church increasingly restricted sanctification in the later Middle Ages, which precipitated new debates over who had the authority to recognize sainthood and what evidence should be used to identify holiness and heterodoxy. The case studies she presents detail how the political climate of the Italian peninsula allowed Italian communities to use saints' cults as a tool to negotiate religious and political autonomy in opposition to growing papal bureaucratization. Open Access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities

The towns of Italy in the later middle ages presents over one hundred fascinating documents, carefully selected and coordinated from the richest, most innovative and most documented society of the European Middle Ages. No other English language sourcebook has the same geographical or chronological range. This collection is carefully structured around the crisis of the fourteenth century and arranged in contrasting groups of texts. By connecting documents in translation to recent scholarship and debates, it addresses five key areas of medieval urban history: the physical environment, civic religion, economy, society and politics. Offers students well-translated and effectively contextualised documents along with some guidance to the secondary work of Italian scholars which is largely inaccessible to undergraduate students.

In The Lay Saint, Mary Harvey Doyno investigates the phenomenon of saintly cults that formed around pious merchants, artisans, midwives, domestic servants, and others in the medieval communes of northern and central Italy. Drawing on a wide array of sources—vitae documenting their saintly lives and legends, miracle books, religious art, and communal records—Doyno uses the rise of and tensions surrounding these civic cults to explore medieval notions of lay religiosity, charismatic power, civic identity, and the church's authority in this period. Although claims about laymen's and laywomen's miraculous abilities challenged the church's expanding political and spiritual dominion, both papal and civic authorities, Doyno finds, vigorously promoted their cults. She shows that this support was neither a simple reflection of the extraordinary lay religious zeal that marked late medieval urban life nor of the Church's recognition of that enthusiasm. Rather, the history of lay saints' cults powerfully illustrates the extent to which lay Christians embraced the vita apostolic—the ideal way of life as modeled by the Apostles—and of the church's efforts to restrain and manage such claims.

A unique book! Italian women at their best! What talent! This book is a must read for everyone who loves Italian culture and those who appreciate talented women. Extensively researched with hundreds of references, it is a comprehensive encyclopedic analysis highlighting the length and breadth of Italy’s most incredibly talented women, including 114 writers, 56 opera singers, 63 other singers, 55 musicians, 52 film icons, 39 fashion designers, 59 medical women, 40 chefs, 47 artists, 23 academics and 114 sportswomen, amongst others. All discussed in chronological order in each of their fields with many interesting stories, including a chapter on the emigration of impressive female Italian talent.

This book visits the fact that, in the pre-modern world, saints and lords served structurally similar roles, acting as patrons to those beneath them on the spiritual or social ladder with the word "patron" used to designate both types of elite sponsor. Chapman argues that this elision of patron saints and patron lords remained a distinctive feature of the early modern English imagination and that it is central to some of the key works of literature in the period. Writers like Jonson, Shakespeare, Spenser, Drayton, Donne and, Milton all use medieval patron saints in order to represent and to challenge early modern ideas of patronage -- not just patronage in the narrow sense of the immediate economic relations obtaining between client and sponsor, but also patronage as a society-wide system of obligation and reward that itself crystallized a whole culture’s assumptions about order and degree. The works studied in this book -- ranging from Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI, written early in the 1590s, to Milton’s Masque Performed at Ludlow Castle, written in 1634 -- are patronage works, either aimed at a specific patron or showing a keen awareness of the larger patronage system. This volume challenges the idea that the early modern world had shrugged off its own medieval past, instead arguing that Protestant writers in the period were actively using the medieval Catholic ideal of the saint as a means to represent contemporary systems of hierarchy and dependence. Saints had been the ideal -- and idealized -- patrons of the medieval world and remained so for early modern English recusants. As a result, their legends and iconographies provided early modern Protestant authors with the perfect tool for thinking about the urgent and complex question of who owed allegiance to whom in a rapidly changing world.

Margherita Colonna (1255–1280) was born into one of the great baronial families that dominated Rome politically and culturally in the thirteenth century. After the death of her father and mother, Margherita was raised by her brothers, including Cardinal Giacomo Colonna. The two extant contemporary accounts of her short life offer a daring model of mystical lay piety forged in imitation of St. Francis but worked out in the vibrant world of medieval Rome. In Visions of Sainthood in Medieval Rome, Larry F. Field, Lezlie S. Knox, and Sean L. Field present the first English translations of Margherita Colonna’s two “lives” and a dossier of associated texts, along with thoroughly researched contextualization and scholarly examination. The first of the two lives was written by a layman, the Roman Senator Giovanni Colonna, one of Margherita Colonna's brothers. The second was written by a woman named Stefania, who had been a close follower of Margherita Colonna and assumed leadership of her Franciscan community after Margherita's death. These intriguing texts open up new perspectives on numerous historical questions. How did authorial gender and status influence hagiographic perspective? How fluid was the nature of female Franciscan identity during the era in which the papacy was creating the Order of St. Clare? What were the experiences and influences of female visionaries? And what was the process of saint-making at the heart of an aristocratic Roman family? These texts add rich new texture to our overall picture of medieval visionary culture and will interest students and scholars of medieval and renaissance history, literature, religion, and women's studies.

The image, status and function of queens and empresses, regnant and consort, in kingdoms stretching from England to Jerusalem in the European middle ages. Did queens exercise real or counterfeit power? Did the promotion of the cult of the Virgin enhance or restrict their sphere of action? Is it time to revise the early feminist view of women as victims? Important papers on Emma of England, Margaret of Scotland, coronation and burial ritual, Byzantine empresses and Scandinavian queens, among others, clearly indicate that a reassessment of the role of women in the world of medieval dynastic politics is under way. Contributors: JANOS BAK, GEORGE CONKLIN, PAUL CROSSLEY, VOLKER HONEMANN, STEINAR IMSEN, LIZ JAMES, KURT-ULRICH JASCHKE, SARAH LAMBERT, JANET L. NELSON, JOHN C. PARSONS, KAREN PRATT, DION SMYTHE, PAULINE STAFFORD, MARY STROLL, VALERIE WALL, ELIZABETH WARD, DIANA WEBB.

Until the beginning of the 18th century, to be 'Italian' meant to identify with a number of collective memories, rather than a national memory. Yet there are elements of continuity that have shaped Italian identity over the past 1,500 years. Religion, food, art and architecture, a literary language, as well as a particular relationship between cities and countryside, between family and civil society have all contributed to present day Italian culture and politics. Baldoli explores the history of Italy as a country, rather than as a nation, in order to trace its fascinating cultural and political development. Offering a way into each period of Italian history, the book brings Italy's past to life with extracts from poetry, novels and music. Drawing on the latest research published in English and Italian, this is the ideal introduction for all those interested in Italy's cultural and social past and its significance for the country's present.