8 Cities ofGod
Saint Giovanni Buono of Mantua or Saint Galgano of Siena, never ceased to
be part of the city landscape. Their neighbors responded to these remarkable
individuals by ‘‘canonizing’’ them, that is, by praying to them after death
and expecting miracles. Cities collaborated in the cults, erecting shrines and
fostering devotion. Sometimes devotees called in the papacy to validate a
saint, but this was neither necessary nor common. A network of local shrines
imposed a kind of ‘‘charismatic’’ overlay on the religious geography of civic
and ecclesiastical institutions. The saint, living at home or supernaturally
present at his shrine, was a fixture of urban religious geography.
Partiof this book draws heavily on city and ecclesiastical statutes, tithe
lists, court litigation, and hagiography. Studies on the significance of the
names that Italians gave their children, like those on the relative popularity
of civic patron saints, I have used whenever available, though mostly by
default, since little other evidence exists for religious institutions and atti-
tudes.^33 The transition from legal and administrative texts to lived realities,
and from hagiographic commonplaces to actual people, is fraught with pit-
falls. Nonetheless, if particular saints did not perform the marvels ascribed
to them, their biographers still had to assimilate the saints to conventional
ways of holiness. And that is exactly our subject. Furthermore, when empha-
sizing the miraculous, biographers could not hide the very conventionality
that recommended saints to the neighbors who canonized them. In legal
texts, too, a society often speaks to itself about shared ideals and fears.
PartII: ReligiousObservance
Shared religion is shared behavior as well as space. Partiifocuses on the
shared behavior of communal Catholics, but it is not a study of ‘‘popular
religion.’’^34 It is a study of communal—that is, urban—religion as experi-
enced by all its practitioners, from the common people to the elites. The first
three chapters of this section are liturgical history, understanding ‘‘liturgy’’
in its original Greek meaning as ‘‘the work of the people.’’ I focus more on
the laity than the clergy, even though the rituals described are mostly the
formal cult of the Church, the sacraments of the Mass, penance, and bap-
tism. I have foregrounded, in all three chapters, the ‘‘nave’’ and back-
grounded the ‘‘choir.’’ In church, movement, gesture, and sensation spoke
- See Violante, ‘‘Sistemi,’’ 40 – 41.
- For criticism of the idea of ‘‘popular religion,’’ see Jean-Claude Schmitt, ‘‘ ‘Religion populaire’ et
culture folklorique,’’Annales: E ́conomies—socie ́te ́s—civilisations 31 ( 1976 ): 941 – 53 ; Natalie Davis, ‘‘Some Tasks
and Themes in the Study of Popular Religion,’’The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance
Religion,ed. Charles Trinkaus and Heiko A. Oberman, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Thought,
10 (Leiden: Brill, 1974 ), 307 – 36 ; ead., ‘‘From ‘Popular Religion’ to Religious Cultures,’’Reformation Europe:
A Guide to Research,ed. Steven Ozment (St. Louis: Center for Reformation Research, 1982 ), 321 – 42 ;
Leonard Boyle, ‘‘Popular Piety in the Middle Ages: What Is Popular?’’Florilegium 4 ( 1982 ): 184 – 93 ; and
John Van Engen, ‘‘The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem,’’American Historical
Review 91 ( 1988 ): 512 – 52. In my opinion, the most trenchant critique of the ‘‘popular-religion’’ model
remains Peter Brown,The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Antiquity(Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1981 ), 12 – 20.