Providing new insights into the Bianchi devotions, a medieval popular religious revival which responded to an outbreak of plague at the turn of the fifteenth century, this book takes a comparative, local and regional approach to the Bianchi, challenging traditional presentations of the movement as homogeneous whole. Combining a rich collection of textual, visual, and material sources, the study focuses on the two Tuscan towns of Lucca and Pistoia. Alexandra R.A. Lee demonstrates how the Bianchi processions in central Italy were moulded by secular and ecclesiastical authorities and shaped by local traditions as they attempted to prevent an epidemic.

In the summer of 1399 a wave of popular devotion swept through Italy from the Alps to Rome. Men, women, and children from city and countryside joined in pious processions lasting nine days. Dubbed "Bianchi" because of their white robes, they listened to sermons, sang hymns, observed dietary restrictions, and prayed for "peace and mercy." Daniel E. Bornstein reconstructs the history of the Bianchi in unparalleled detail, and his conclusions offer new insight into the character of late medieval Christianity. Drawing on a wide range of sources including diaries, hymns, and government reports, Bornstein offers nuanced analyses of both the spiritual and the political dimensions of the movement. After describing the origins of the Bianchi as a movement concerned with the conflict and violence of the age, he traces its spread through Italy, paying particular attention to local variations. Focusing on the relationship between lay participants and ecclesiastical authorities, Bornstein demonstrates that the Bianchi represent what might be called a popular orthodoxy—a spontaneous and deeply sincere rallying to the approved beliefs and traditional practices of the church. In conclusion, he argues that scholars who have assumed a sharp division between lay and clerical religion in the late Middle Ages have misconstrued the development of Christianity in fundamental ways.

Queen of Sorrows takes an original approach to both late-medieval Italian history and the history of Christianity, using quantitative and qualitative analyses of a remarkable archive of 1,904 testaments to determine patterns in giving to the Virgin of Loreto shrine in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Bianca M. Lopez argues that in central Italy, as elsewhere, the cult of the Virgin Mary gained new prominence at this time of unprecedented mortality. Individuals gave to Santa Maria di Loreto, which houses the structure in which Mary is believed to have lived, as an expression of their grief in the hope of strengthening family lineages beyond death and to care for loved ones believed to be languishing in purgatory. Lopez establishes statistical correlations between different social groups and their donations to Loreto over time, uncovering informative new historical patterns such as the prominence of widow and migrant donors in the notarial record. The testaments also provide a social history of Recanati, revealing how its denizens venerated Mary as a saint with unrivaled spiritual power and uniquely sympathetic to grief, having lost her own son, Jesus. In the fourteenth century, plague survivors transformed their anguish into Marian devotion. The devastation of the plague brought the Virgin out of noble courts and monasteries and onto city streets. As Queen of Sorrows details, however, the popularity and growing wealth of Loreto's Marian shrine attracted the attention of the papacy and peninsular seigneurial lords, who eventually brought Santa Maria di Loreto under the control of the Church.

In The Benefits of Peace: Private Peacemaking in Late Medieval Italy Glenn Kumhera offers the first comprehensive account of private peacemaking, weaving together its legal, religious, political and social meanings across several cities (13th-15th centuries). The ability of peacemaking to hinder criminal prosecution has often been considered the result of government powerlessness. Kumhera, however, examines the benefits of private peacemaking, detailing how its flexibility was crucial in creating a viable criminal justice system that emphasized violence prevention and recognition of jurisdiction while allowing space for friends, neighbors and clergy to intervene. Additionally, he explores the roles of women and clergy in peacemaking, how peace operated in a vendetta culture and how the medieval understanding of reconciliation affected the practice of peacemaking.

These works by Sister Bartolomea Riccoboni offer an intimate portrait of the women who inhabited the Venetian convent of Corpus Domini, where they shared a religious life bounded physically by the convent wall and organized temporally by the rhythms of work and worship. At the same time, they show how this cloistered community vibrated with news of the great ecclesiastical events of the day, such as the Great Western Schism and the Council of Constance. While the chronicle recounts the history of the nuns' collective life, the necrology provides highly individualized biographies of nearly fifty women who died in the convent between 1395 and 1436. We follow the fascinating stories that led these women, from adolescent girls to elderly widows, to join the convent; and we learn of their cultural backgrounds and intellectual accomplishments, their ascetic practices and mystical visions, their charity and devotion to each other and their fortitude in the face of illness and death. The personal and social meaning of religious devotion comes alive in these texts, the first of their kind to be translated into English.

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.

Medieval Italian communes are known for their violence, feuds, and vendettas, yet beneath this tumult was a society preoccupied with peace. Peace and Penance in Late Medieval Italy is the first book to examine how civic peacemaking in the age of Dante was forged in the crucible of penitential religious practice. Focusing on Florence in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, an era known for violence and civil discord, Katherine Ludwig Jansen brilliantly illuminates how religious and political leaders used peace agreements for everything from bringing an end to neighborhood quarrels to restoring full citizenship to judicial exiles. She brings to light a treasure trove of unpublished evidence from notarial archives and supports it with sermons, hagiography, political treatises, and chronicle accounts. She paints a vivid picture of life in an Italian commune, a socially and politically unstable world that strove to achieve peace. Jansen also assembles a wealth of visual material from the period, illustrating for the first time how the kiss of peace—a ritual gesture borrowed from the Catholic Mass—was incorporated into the settlement of secular disputes. Breaking new ground in the study of peacemaking in the Middle Ages, Peace and Penance in Late Medieval Italy adds an entirely new dimension to our understanding of Italian culture in this turbulent age by showing how peace was conceived, memorialized, and occasionally achieved.

Examines the complex relationships between religion, society and charity in private and public life in Florence - Development of confraternities.

The fourteenth, seventeenth and twentieth centuries in European history were marked by exceptionally intense experiences of power, violence and mass death. Power, Violence and Mass Death in Pre-Modern and Modern Times undertakes the ambitious and entirely new task of analyzing, through comparison, the importance of power, violence and mass death in these centuries. Death and the excesses of power were characteristics of the twentieth century, but this volume teaches about the causes and possible consequences of this oppressive individual and collective experience. We now have a more established historical perspective for understanding the importance of power and the causes and results of the rapid increase in mortality in the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this way, this volume makes progress towards reaching new perceptions of all three 'crisis' epochs. Appealing to a wide readership, Power, Violence and Mass Death in Pre-Modern and Modern Times will be of interest to scholars not only of the three centuries highlighted, but also to anyone with an historical and sociological interest in the larger questions raised about the nature of power, violence and mass death on European society.