Preaching Peace in Renaissance Italy: Bernardino of Siena and His Audience.
Peterson, David S.
By Cynthia L. Polecretti. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University
of America Press, 2000. x + 271 pp. $61.95 cloth.
In her beautifully written and subtly argued study, Cynthia
Polecretti joins Carlo Delcorno, Zelina Zafarana, Roberto Rusconi, and
Bernadette Paton in underscoring the cultural importance of Renaissance
sermon collections. Not only do they preserve the prescriptions that
clerics imposed on their audiences; carefully read, they can reveal more
complex and contradictory religious and social messages that the laity
themselves wanted to hear. Those of Bernardino of Siena (1380-1444) are
particularly illuminating, for he was both a leader in the institutional
movement of Observant Franciscan reform and sufficiently popular among
laymen to be invited to numerous northern Italian cities to deliver not
only Lenten sermons but special sermon cycles devoted to civic
peacemaking. Moreover, of several verbatim transcriptions
(reportationes) that survive, that made by Benedetto di maestro
Bartolomeo is especially valuable as a virtual
"tape-recording" (182) of the forty-five sermons Bernardino
delivered on a mission to the Sienese between 15 Aug. and 5 Oct. 1427,
for it includes many indications of his audience's reactions.
Polecritti exploits it to explore the relationship of preacher to
audience and an array of broader issues concerning community, vendetta,
and peacemaking in early fifteenth-century Italy, and to develop two
broad themes. First, Bernardino's success derived from his
appreciation of the reciprocal relationship between preacher and
audience: he was "not ... an elite cleric who tried to impose
social control upon his listeners" (16); his great gift was
"in sensing what his audience wanted to hear" (126). Second,
though she is alert to the ritual and dramatic elements of
Bernardino's performances, Polecretti is concerned to challenge
purely behavioralist approaches by reintegrating spirituality and
interior life into the analysis of Renaissance religion: Bernardino
"designed rituals which inspired dramatic displays of group piety,
but his words always emphasized individual conversion" (10);
"his final goal was always inner transformation, even if within the
context of public display" (83).
Not averse to using props such as his Name of Jesus (YHS) tavoletta
and bonfires of vanities to hold his audience's attention,
Bernardino's goal was to create images that would "supersede the listeners' memories of the actual content of the sermons"
(79). Less flamboyant than Giovanni da Capestrano or Roberto da Lecce,
he was "unwilling to exploit the emotions of the crowd beyond a
certain point" (78). Neither an original thinker nor particularly
logical, his strength as a preacher lay in his use of entertaining
anecdotes (exempla) and his ability to engage members of the audience
individually. In his role as padre penitenziale, mouthpiece of the Word,
and swordsman of the Lord, he could be savage in excoriating sodomites,
witches, heretics, and partisans who rent the fabric of Christian
society. But he was sympathetic to the women who made up the bulk of his
audiences and whom he regarded as more spiritually adept than the men;
they were less offended by his diatribes against feminine vanitas than
by the detailed advice on sexual sin that he offered their daughters.
Among the men he addressed himself to literate but small-time merchants,
and though he condemned great usurers, he was careful not to offend the
wealthy and the powerful. Though he avoided public criticism of the
clergy, most of his enemies were rival ecclesiastics, not laymen.
Bernardino was no more naive about the power of sermons alone to
produce lasting peace than is Polecretti. He had to steer between the
Scylla of an ideal of communitas which "could only be an incomplete
one" (85) and the Charybdis of "personal ambition and
partisanship" (99). Surveying the variety of mechanisms, from
formal agreements (instrumenta pacis) to go-betweens (mezzani), public
authority to informal social pressure whereby Italians sought to
establish civic peace, Polecretti acknowledges that the
chroniclers' accounts are often vague, reflecting as much pious
aspiration as concrete reality. Bernardino's sermons could only
encourage positive action "about a sentiment which was already
current" (111); "big public demonstrations of unity ... were
conditioned by what people felt should happen" (114). Observantine
friars made ideal peacemakers because they were sufficiently
"outside" secular society and "possessed the zeal and
emaciated physical appearance of traditional holy men, yet were not
quite strange enough to alienate sophisticated urban audiences"
(101). They supported papal authority and strong government, and were
less aggressive than earlier "Alleluia" preachers. Bernardino
avoided the confrontationalism of a Bernardino da Feltre and took a much
less active role in negotiations than Giacomo delle Marche. He was
concerned less with the finality of public rituals of peacemaking, the
pace di fuore, than with how these might contribute to the longer-term
conversion, the pace di dentro, of their individual participants (124).
Bernardino refrained from addressing political and institutional
issues directly, reducing them instead to matters of personal morality.
Giovanni Miccoli and Daniel Lesnick have seen here collaboration between
the mendicants and Italy's ruling elites to maintain social order.
Polecretti regards it instead as a practical necessity and a reflection
of the way Italians actually viewed the problem of factional strife
(136). At the core of factionalism was the vendetta; at its root,lay
gossip, slander, and the defense of honor. Bernardino's belief that
words "could break human society as well as create it"
reflects "the darker side of the humanists' optimistic belief
in the power of words to bind people together" (145). Polecretti
draws on the literature on feud, vendetta, and male codes of honor, and
makes rich use of contemporary advice literature to evoke the paranoid
"psychological landscape" (150) of fifteenth-century Italian
sociability: "One aspect of the `individualism' expressed by
fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italians is a heightened and
articulated consciousness of society's dangers" (153). Nor was
Bernardino entirely free of the mentality of his audience. Defensive of
his own masculine role as preacher, he warned his listeners also of the
vengeance of an offended God.
Polecretti draws these threads together in a final day-by-day
analysis of the manner in which Bernardino played on the hopes and fears
of his Sienese audience in the sermon cycle of 1427. By turns menacing
and cajoling, he contrasted the two possible cities depicted in Ambrogio
Lorenzetti's frescos of peace and war, alternating between direct
attacks on factionalism and broader assaults on the vices that tore at
the social fabric. Brought into a still peaceful city teetering on the
brink of violence, Bernardino understood that "the Sienese
government wanted a demonstration of unity, one of those morality plays
of social concord, while Bernardino desired a peacemaking between souls
but also a general conversion from sin" (186). Though many peaces
were made in the sequel, the one long-term institutional consequence of
Bernardino's mission was a reduction in the penalty of the
city's curfew law (185).
Extending Augustine Thompson's and Daniel Bornstein's
work on the earlier Italian peace movements of the "Alleluia"
(1233) and the Bianchi (1399), Polecretti's book adds considerable
chiaroscuro to Iris Origo's classic study of Bernardino's
sermons and complements Franco Mormando's recent treatment of
Bernardino's "demons" as well as Peter Howard's
analysis of Bernardino's less charismatic contemporary, Antoninus
of Florence. Specialists will appreciate its nuanced arguments as much
as students will enjoy its fluid exposition.
David S. Peterson
Washington and Lee University
