Piety and Charity in Late Medieval Florence.

Peterson, David S.

This volume encompasses nearly two books in one. In the first half, John Henderson provides a comprehensive institutional analysis of 163 confraternities founded in Florence from the mid-thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries. In the second, he surveys the city's numerous charitable institutions including, in a detailed case-study, one of its earliest, largest, and most complex, the confraternity of Orsanmichele. The two parts of the book are bridged thematically by the "Pauline" concept of charity (9), which for Henderson linked private religious devotion to neighborly compassion over the course of this period. Challenging the view that the Quattrocento was a "golden age" of Tuscan charity (354), he underscores the medieval origins of these institutions. Emphasizing the fusion of "secular and sacred" (411) in the confraternities' commixture of civic, social, religious, and ecclesiastical elements, he finds evidence of increasing religious aspiration among the laity, rather than a form of laicization often mistaken for Renaissance secularity. While stressing continuities, he also delineates the two broad shifts in religious and charitable organization that occurred after the mid-fourteenth century, from laudesi to flagellant confraternities, and from omnibus charitable institutions to specialized hospitals.

Florentine confraternities had their roots in the corporations, in consorterie, mendicant-inspired devotions, and in ideals of caritas and the buon comune of medieval Italian cities. Forty-five such institutions were founded from 1250 to 1350, 60 more in the following century, and 58 again between 1450 and 1500. By the fifteenth century, civic and ecclesiastical authorities were increasing their surveillance and intervention - the commune to check their seditious potential, the ecclesiastics to curtail possible deviance and the neglect of parish life. The bulk of the institutions founded in the first century were laudesi and charitable confraternities. Unique to north-central Italy, the laudesi grew out of the Marian cult promoted by the friars, and offered laymen more personal devotions that supplemented the mass by incorporating into their meetings the singing of praises to Christ, Mary, the apostles, and other saints and martyrs. But the elaboration of their public musical performances - along with festivals devoted to local saints, the development of sacred drama (sacre rappresentazioni), and a growing emphasis on commemorative masses for their members - left even wealthy, city-wide companies heavily in debt by the early fifteenth century. Meanwhile, the number of artisan confraternities rose. But the most dramatic shift was toward the disciplinati, whose foundations increased sharply after 1350. Henderson emphasizes that flagellation was but one element in their penitential devotions, which focused on a redemptive rather than wrathful Christ, and also included confession, sacramental ablution, and preaching - much of which was undertaken by laymen as the fifteenth century advanced. Less acquisitive than the laudesi, the flagellants did not become entangled in the finances of commemoration, though they also provided vital funeral services to their members. Attendance could be surprisingly slack; but from the mid-fifteenth century new, more rigorous, and distinctively Florentine "companies of the night" were founded that combined preaching, the production of sacre rappresentazione, and religious education for boys.

Many confraternities required some form of charitable activity, but service to non-members was central to companies like Orsanmichele. Originally founded as a laudese company to venerate a miraculous image of the virgin in a uniquely combined shrine, church, and granary, Orsanmichele's membership and endowments expanded dramatically in the early fourteenth century. It soon acquired a semi-public character as a leading distributor of alms, and became a locus of civic and guild religious identities. Henderson offers minute analyses of its patchy records of alms-giving to refute "the old historiographical chestnut" (242) that medieval Catholic charity served only stereotypical Biblical categories, while ignoring the needs of the genuine poor. Though always favoring the "respectable poor" with fixed addresses, Orsanmichele's captains adjusted distributions to meet changing circumstances, shifting support early in the fourteenth century from the "voluntary poor" (religious) to families with children as the economy declined, and after the Black Death to dowering women who could facilitate repopulation. Moreover, Biblical groups such as women and orphans often really were those most at risk.

Henderson confirms, however, the broader indictment of Florentine charity that often lies behind these discussions when he writes that its solutions were never adequate nor meant to provide more than the minimum palliative necessary to avert revolt and to maintain the social and political order. Indeed, by the late fourteenth century Orsanmichele's captains were regularly charged with embezzlement by communal officials who themselves raked off hefty loans and taxes. What money remained went largely to building and decoration. Peers like the Misericordia and Bigallo followed similar trajectories. Nevertheless, a new generation of less amateurish institutions managed to be founded in this period. Large hospitals, amply endowed by private individuals and shielded from direct communal interference, now targeted specific groups such as poor women (the Orbatello, 1372), the sick (Messer Bonifazio, 1377), and orphans (the Innocenti, 1419). The only Quattrocento charitable confraternity founded on the old model was the Buonuomini di San Martino, and even it offered little to the indigent poor.

Henderson supports his arguments with a wealth of graphs, tables, and statistics. He is skeptical of vague theories and dramatic periodization in the extensive secondary literature he canvasses. Linking mendicant piety to a new mercantile mentality is reductive, he writes; tying the rise of confraternities to the penitential processions of 1260 is too simple. The practical need for decent burial after the Black Death explains the surge in confraternal foundations better than fuzzy appeals to grief and generalized guilt. He is most impatient with historians who have constructed a "utopian" vision of a new direction in Quattrocento Florentine charity shaped by "civic humanism" (354). Here, although Henderson offers a variety of practical explanations for specific developments, I feel that his determination to tone down earlier generalizations and to draw the foundations of Florentine charity back to the buon comune of Remigio de' Girolami, made him reluctant, despite the results his study yielded, to explore the possibility of a basic change in Florentine attitudes in the late Trecento, from celebration toward penance, from ad hoc civic charity to coordinated professional philanthropy. His argument for continuity might better have been supported by a case study of a hospital with a continuous history over this period, like Santa Mafia Nuova. Readers may challenge the strictly pragmatic and matter-of-fact key in which Henderson registers many of his interpretations, but they will be doing so on a vast empirical terrain that he has usefully mapped out.

DAVID S. PETERSON Newberry Library