The Bianchi of 1399: Popular Devotion in Late Medieval Italy.
Peterson, David S.
In the summer of 1399 Italy was swept up in a wave of religious fervor that surprised contemporaries as much as it has perplexed historians. Italians of all social strata were suddenly inspired to don the white penitential robes of flagellants (thus, bianchi), confess, take up the cross, and pledge themselves to nine days of fasting and processions which, in their extra- as well as intra-urban circuits, conveyed the movement from Liguria down to Rome. Crying out for mercy and peace and singing praises (laude) to the Virgin, the penitents were accompanied by flagellants, healers, seers, sight-seers, miracles and hucksters, to the point that historians have portrayed the movement as everything from an outburst of late medieval religious hysteria to a large Renaissance picnic. Daniel Bornstein's reassessment adds new archival details to the narrative sources culled by Italian historians to provide a microhistory with a broad social base, geared to the normative rather than the exceptional. It provides a litmus for challenging the once-fashionable dichotomies between lay and clerical, or popular and elite religious culture. The bianchi are evidence that, at the turn of the Quattrocento, "orthodoxy was truly popular . . . the church commanded the ready assent of the Italian populace," and Italy was a "churchly-minded" society akin to Bernd Moeller's pre-Reformation Germany (7).
Bornstein situates the bianchi in a survey of late medieval institutions and devotional practices that underscores the tenuous role of ecclesiastical sacraments in lay devotion, the importance of preaching and procession, and the growth, variety, and essentially spiritual purpose of lay-directed confraternities. Unlike earlier movements such as that of the Perugian flagellants of 1260, the bianchi introduced no new devotions but drew instead on traditional institutions and religious practices. Though their origin stories conveyed strong disciplinary and millenarian strains, Bornstein distinguishes their "mythic paradigm" from "ritual enactment" to underscore their essential character as a peace movement (46). Emerging in Genoese Liguria - a region racked by vendetta, schism, and heresy - they sought salvation in social pacification, rather than flagellation or the millennium.
Bornstein traces in meticulous detail the two lines of the movement's diffusion: east over the Apennines to Venice, and south through Tuscany and Umbria to Rome. In the bianchi laude he finds the "dynamic unity" of their faith expressed in simple and concrete language (118, 127). Portraying an angry and vengeful Jesus, emphasizing the role of Mary as an intercessor, and appealing to "the traditional Christian program of social justice" (139) they treated subjects that were part of the "common stock of late medieval spirituality" (145). Their crucifixes worked many healing (and legitimating) miracles: men were cured of physical ailments, women of dementia; images of the virgin wept real tears, and while there were skeptics and charletans, there were also miracles of vengeance on unbelievers. The greatest miracle of all was the change of heart that inspired peace compacts between families and states along the way.
Precisely because the bianchi were orderly, carried no worrying ideological baggage, and lacked a charismatic leader like the earlier Venturino of Bergarno (1335), churchmen like Bishop Jacopo Fieschi of Genoa and, after some hesitation, Pope Boniface IX, embraced the movement and managed to reinforce the sacramental and miraculous elements of bianchi devotion. But they did not control it, and a subsequent clerical effort to stage a seven-day revival fell flat. Temporal authorities, worried by crowds and supernatural displays of power, were more cautious. Giangaleazzo Visconti cited resurgence of the plague as grounds for curtailing inter-city processions in Lombardy. The Venetians, declaring that they had sufficient religion already, stopped the bianchi at their border: when the Dominican preacher Giovanni Dominici staged an ersatz procession to assert his authority in the city he too, after much hand-wringing, was expelled. But rulers of smaller states, such as the Malatesta of Rimini and the Florentines, saw in the bianchi legitimating possibilities and fully accepted their their legislative demands.
Bornstein's analysis of the bianchi supports his major premise that this was a deeply Christianized society whose different orders shared fundamental religious beliefs. He thus provides a vital counter to narratives of European religion which, from Pastor to Delumeau, have treated the Renaissance as pagan. But in his efforts to uncover the "dynamic unity" of late medieval Christianity and to resist dichotomizing and sensationalizing, he is overly scrupulous. The bianchi were indeed an essentially conservative peace movement, but his treatment of origin myths tends to marginalize the disciplinary and millennarian strains that were also present. In analyzing the laude, he has filtered out sources that might be "too carefully individual" (122), and his broad references to "traditional," "conventional" and "common stock" beliefs are unsatisfying. Nor does it follow that because orthodoxy was popular, Italians were unquestioning of ecclesiastical leadership and unmoved by the failures of the schismatic hierarchy; indeed, much of his evidence undercuts the assumption. His reluctance to link the bianchi to subsequent confraternal activities is very cautious; his effort to place them at the font of subsequent juridicial and police development is, he admits, speculative (193, 206). Nevertheless, his first chapter will find a place in the religion section of every respectable Renaissance syllabus, and the book will introduce students to an historiographically rich thesis, and to a wealth of Italian scholarship.
DAVID S. PETERSON Newberry Library
