2 Cities ofGod
Among Grundmann’s areas of interest, heretics were the first to generate
a scholarly industry, already vital in the 1960 s. The bibliography on heresy
in medieval Italy is vast and ever expanding.^3 There is also a growing recog-
nition that heresy cannot be understood apart from the religion it rejected.^4
In spite of their prominence in modern scholarship, heretics represented only
a tiny fraction of the medieval Italian population. Since 1980 Grundmann’s
interest in thirteenth-century mysticism has been transformed, in great part
by the work of Andre ́ Vauchez, into a rich and expanded field of study, that
of saints and holiness.^5 But again, as in the case of heretics, saints represented
only a tiny fraction, albeit an important one, of those living in the medieval
Italian cities. New studies on ‘‘popular religion’’ and ‘‘lay piety’’ initially
appeared to be very promising.^6 But the religious experience studied in these
books tends to dissolve into a disembodied piety; day-to-day realities are lost
in generalizations and abstraction. This book is a study of neither the ‘‘popu-
lar religion’’ nor the ‘‘lay piety’’ showcased in such books. It is, I hope,
something greater, a recovery of the religious world of all in the Italian
cities who considered themselves orthodox Christians. Medieval lay piety is
incomprehensible without the sacraments and the clergy, but ‘‘popular reli-
gion’’ is seldom treated as part of the larger world of orthodox worship and
belief. Perhaps its very ‘‘legality’’ and ordinariness make the garden variety
of Christian life so elusive.^7 The scarcity of sources and the opacity of those
- Carl T. Berkhout and Jeffrey B. Russell,Medieval Heresies: A Bibliography, 1960 – 1979 ,Subsidia Medi-
aevalia, 11 (Toronto: PIMS, 1981 ); Eugene Dupre ́ Theseider, ‘‘Problemi di eresiologia medioevale,’’Bollet- tino della Societadi studi valdesi 76 ( 1957 ): 3 – 17 ; Raoul Manselli, ‘‘Les he ́re ́tiques dans la socie ́te ́italienne du
13 esiecle,’’He ́re ́sies et socie ́te ́s dans l’Europe pre ́-industrielle, 11 e– 18 esiecles, ed. Jacques Le Goff (Paris: Mouton,
1968 ), 199 – 202 ; Mariano D’Alatri, ‘‘ ‘Eresie’ perseguite dall’inquisizione in Italia nel corso del duecento,’’
The Concept of Heresy in the Middle Ages ( 11 th– 13 th C.),Mediaevalia Lovaniensia, ser. 1 , stud. 4 (Louvain:
Louvain University Press, 1976 ); id.,Eretici e inquisitori in Italia: Studi e documenti(Rome: Istituto Storico dei
Cappuccini, 1986 ); Grado G. Merlo,Eretici ed eresie medievali(Bologna: Il Mulino, 1989 ); on the Walden-
sians, id.,Valdesi e valdismi medievali(Turin: Claudiana, 1984 ), and Gabriel Audisio,The Waldensian Dissent:
Persecution and Survival, c. 1170 –c. 1570 ,trans. Claire Davison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999 ); on Catharism in Orvieto, Carol Lansing,Power and Purity: Cathar Heresy in Medieval Italy(New York:
Oxford University Press, 1998 ). - So Gabriele Zanella, ‘‘Malessere ereticale in valle padana ( 1260 – 1308 ),’’Hereticalia: Temi e discussioni
(Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 1995 ), 60. ‘‘Orthodoxy’’ could include anticlerical-
ism and even private doubt: Walter L. Wakefield, ‘‘Some Unorthodox Popular Ideas of the Thirteenth
Century,’’Medievalia et Humanistica,n.s., 4 ( 1973 ): 25 – 35. - See, above all, Andre ́Vauchez,La saintete ́en Occident aux derniers sie
cles du Moyen Aˆge d’apres les proces de canonisation et les documents hagiographiques,Bibliotheque des E ́coles franc ̧aises d’Athe`nes et de Rome, 241
(Rome: E ́cole Franc ̧aise de Rome, 1981 ), translated by Jean Birrell asSainthood in the Later Middle Ages
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996 ). In Einaudi’sStoria d’Italia, 2 : 1 , the saints now appear, pp.
807 – 9. - Andre ́ Vauchez,Les laı ̈cs au Moyen Aˆge: Pratiques et expe ́riences religieuses(Paris: Cerf, 1987 ), now happily
available in English asThe Laity in the Middle Ages: Religious Beliefs and Devotional Practices,ed. Daniel E.
Bornstein, trans. M. J. Schneider (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993 ); Raoul Manselli,
La religion populaire au Moyen Aˆge: Proble`mes de me ́thode et d’histoire(Quebec: Institut d’E ́tudes Me ́die ́vales
Albert-le-Grand, 1975 ); Rosalind Brooke and Christopher Brooke,Popular Religion in the Middle Ages(Lon-
don: Thames & Hudson, 1984 ); and Bernard Hamilton,Religion in the Medieval West(London: Arnold,
1986 ). - Judith Maltby,Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England(Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998 ), 5.