10 Cities ofGod
the liturgical context. Taken with the earlier chapters on sacramental life,
this completes my overview of orthodox religious practice and experience
within the spiritual geography described in the first part of the book. Narra-
tive sources paint a vivid picture of the ‘‘lay Psalter,’’ the practice of reciting
a set number of Our Fathers and Hail Marys that would become the Rosary
of the late Middle Ages and modern Catholicism. Manuscript collections of
devotions and prayers dating as early as the 1200 s suggest more bookish
forms of piety. A final chapter focuses on death and the rituals that gave it
meaning, linking the living to the faithful departed. Here I consider both the
rituals of dying—making an edifying ‘‘good death’’—and the web of rela-
tions and neighbors who assisted those dying and carried their bodies to the
church and grave. Where they exist, I have drawn on published studies of
Italian wills and testaments, especially for what these can tell us about death-
bed charitable practices.^39 Communal Italians reaffirmed the community
even in death by the performance of suffrages, prayers for the dead. I close
the book by acknowledging how this practice linked the people of the city
here on earth to their neighbors beyond the grave, creating a community
transcending time.
I began this book hoping to write a history of communal religion that,
without completely forgetting heretics and mendicants, left them mostly in
the background so that the vast majority who were neither might be seen.
As I worked on this book, I found it impossible to leave heretics and mendi-
cants totally unremarked. So I have added an epilogue treating both. The
mendicant orders arose in the world of communal piety and ultimately came
to dominate it. In the Epilogue, I sketch the impact of the mendicants’ rise
to hegemony. The friars slowly replaced the lay penitents as the religious
presence in city government. Their great churches refashioned the religious
geography of the cities, and their spiritual authority remolded lay piety. By
the end of the communal period, lay sainthood pretty much demanded affil-
iation with the mendicants through one of their ‘‘third orders.’’ Ironically,
the friars arose from the lay religiosity of the communes, but in the end, as
clerics, they came to dominate it. Their role in the transformation of com-
munal piety, which was a long progressive development, deserves a study of
its own. The friars, often as inquisitors, became arbiters of orthodoxy and
opponents of dissent. Their definition of deviance, like the papacy’s, differed
from that of the lay orthodoxy. By the late 1200 s, the older freelance lay
- Suggestive on this isNolens Intestatus Decedere: Il testamento come fonte della storia religiosa e sociale: Atti
dell’incontro di studio (Perugia, 3 maggio 1983 )(Perugia: Editrice Umbra Cooperativa, 1985 ), esp. Robert
Brentano, ‘‘Considerazioni di un lettore di testamenti,’’ 3 – 9 , which focuses on wills as a source for
religious sensibilities. I have, with regret, chosen not to analyze systematically the many large deposits of
unpublished Italian wills, such as that described for Bologna by Martin Bertram in ‘‘Bologneser Testa-
mentei: Die urkundliche U ̈berlieferung,’’Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken 70
( 1990 ): 151 – 233 , and ‘‘Bologneser Testamenteii: Sondierungen in denLibri Memoriali,’’Quellen und For-
schungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken 71 ( 1991 ): 193 – 240. To have done so would have made this
already long book even longer.