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Penitence and Peace-Making in City and Contado: The Bianchi of 1399

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Diana M. Webb
Diana M. Webb*
Affiliation:
University of London King’s College
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Extract

A major trend in the recent historiography of medieval and renaissance Italy has been towards the reassertion of the fundamental importance of the countryside and of agriculture. This is not so much to deny the unique position occupied by the cities in Italian life as to remind us of some essential features of those cities and of the men who ruled them. Towns were more typically market centres for their localities than entrepôts of long-distance commerce; while many members of both the higher and the lower urban social strata carried with them throughout life a status ultimately derived from the status they or their forebears occupied or had occupied in rural life. Conversely, the members of, say, the Florentine urban patriciate around the year 1400 were almost to a man landlords in the surrounding countryside. They were also of course the men who made the laws, levied taxation and generally controlled the government of the countryside as of the town. At every level of life we have to postulate an intimacy of relations between town and country which the conditions of modern urban life can make it an effort even to imagine.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 16: The Church in Town and Countryside , 1979 , pp. 243 - 256
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1979

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References

1 For a brief survey, see the preface to Waley, D., The Italian City Republics (2 ed London 1978), also pp 55–69 Google Scholar. A major study is Jones, [P.], [‘From Manor to Mezzadria’], Florentine Studies, ed Rubinstein, N. (London 1968) pp 193–241 Google Scholar.

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11 Sercambi pp 320-1.

12 Dominici pp 60, 88.

13 Sercambi pp 317, 363.

14 [Cronica volgare di] anonimo fiorentino [già attribuita a Piero di Giovanni Minerbetti], Muratori, 27 pt 2, pp 240-1. Later, some believed that the original vision had been received by an Irish anchoress, Dominici pp 168-70.

15 Sercambi p 291.

16 Stella p 236.

17 Dominici pp 182-4.

18 Ibid pp 201-2.

19 Ibid pp 125-7; Stella p 241.

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25 Dominici p 101 : ‘E voglio che tu sappi che tutto il nostro contado similmente faceva processione: quelli eran rimasi come noi vestiti di bianco con loro preti e con la loro croce; ogni comune per se e due comuni o cappelle insieme ordinatamente, di villa in villa cantando tutti la laude usata . . . tutti osservando come noi.’

26 Ibid p 112.

27 Sercambi pp 350-2.

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31 Ibid p 160. For Serravalle’s population, see Herlihy p 279.

32 Sercambi p 363.

33 Anonimo fiorentino p 242 : ‘e di niuna cosa pareva che si ricordassono che a fare avessono.’

34 Dominici pp 139-40.

35 Tognetti pp 304-5.

36 Ibid pp 282-91.

37 Webb, D., ‘Andrea Biglia at Bologna : a humanist friar and the troubles of the church’, BIHR, 39 (1976) pp 53-8Google Scholar, where Biglia’s Ammonitio ad fratrem Manfredum Vercellensem is cited from Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana MS H. 117, fols 57v-73v. The work has been printed, with further discussion, by Rusconi, [R.], [‘Fonti e Documenti su Manfredi da Vercelli O.P. ed il suo movimento penitenziale’], AFP, 47 (1977) pp 51-107Google Scholar.

38 Rusconi, p 82: ‘. . . itaque nichil aliud iam curari oportere quam ut, relictis patriis sedibus, Christus quereretur, domi esse periculum, futuros in agris et in montibus securos.’

39 Ibid p 78: ‘Ego quidem non tanto opere admirar turbas et incultum et indoctum hominem secutas: facile enim intelligimus in huiuscemodi turbis ac vulgo rarissimum quemque inveniri, qui ingenio aut prudentia preditus sit, maximeque inter agrestes, quorum ad te concursus erat maior, ac ferme in illis terris quibus non magna inest harum rerum diligentia. Id enim sepe fieri vidimus etiam ad hos, qui passim per villas declamitant, incredibilem turbarum numerum convenire.’

40 Ibid p 81 : ‘Siquidem in turba multi erant agricole, quos plurimum videmus dominorum suorum debitis oppressos, rem iniustissimam esse, ut illis suis creditis fraudarentur.’

41 Jones p 225.

42 Ad fratrem Ludovicum de ordinis nostri forma et propagatione, ed Arbesmann, R., Analecta Augustiniana, 28 (Rome 1695) pp 186–218 Google Scholar.

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