FromConversion toCommunity 93
governatore,began the session by recalling Jesus’ command that all should be
reconciled to their neighbors before offering sacrifice. Members then sought
out those they had offended since the last meeting and asked forgiveness.
This completed, the leader summoned to the altar anyone who had trans-
gressed the rule, so that he might impose penance on him (fig. 35 ). Transgres-
sions punished included missing a meeting, neglect of monthly sacramental
confession, and failure to recite morning and evening prayers. Especially
punished were visits to taverns and worldly amusements such as jousting,
dancing, and horse racing. Each delinquent received ‘‘some particular task’’
(alcuno incaricho) as a penance. Finally, the group knelt and collectively recited
the Confiteor, the admission of sins from the Mass.
So prepared, the community began their devotions. They first recited the
Ave Maria in Latin, doing so responsorially in the form of verses and re-
sponses and using the short form, ending at ‘‘the fruit of thy womb,’’ as usual
in that period. The principal liturgical exercise for those who could read
came next, the little Office of the Virgin—unusual as a lay devotion at this
date. All then recited the Salve Regina, which even the unlettered would
have committed to memory. At the end of the little Office, the prayers re-
turned to the vernacular and to the forms typical of other groups. The leader
proposed prayer intentions in Italian, for each of which the group recited a
Pater and an Ave. This bidding prayer, although similar to the liturgical
form of Good Friday, followed an order wholly independent of the clerical
version. The brothers prayed for the grace of penance and the needs of the
members, the Church hierarchy, the sick, the founder of the society, their
civil officials, their relatives, the whole Christian faithful, the crops, the faith-
ful in purgatory, the leaders of Christendom, and last of all for peace. This
bidding prayer ended with a Pater and an Ave, in responsorial form, and the
usual Latin collects.Qualche lauda spirituale,‘‘some vernacular hymn,’’ ended
the meeting. In their devotions, the group’s ‘‘Marian’’ element, the little
Office, was secondary to the lay liturgy shared by all confraternities of the
period.
The bare outlines of confraternity prayer services can never express the
texture of penitent prayers and devotions, something, alas, mostly lost to us.
The rituals lack the penitents’ tender devotion to the Virgin, their heartfelt
need for penance amid the sins of life, and their call to praise God in action.
Onelaudepreserved in a book used by the Florentine flagellants of the early
fourteenth century expresses their piety beautifully:
This life is like a breeze,
which passes in a moment;
Whoever would be happy,
let him invoke the Virgin Mary;