238 BuoniCattolici
whether the holy man’s occasional failure to pray facing east might indicate
heresy.^15 As the 1200 s progressed, the laity became ever more sensitive to the
division of sacred and profane space and activity. They made their own part
of the church, the nave, as sacred a place as the choir, to be used for prayer,
not for secular business. One lay writer emphasized that in the nave one
paid reverence to God and the saints quietly: no laughing, games, jokes, or
nonsense.^16 Cities soon looked with horror on the older uses of the nave for
drinking, assignations with women, or, even worse, violence or insult.^17
Peter the Chanter, in a manual of prayer circulated in communal Italy,
explained how to enter the church. ‘‘Catholic men and women’’ first knelt
or bowed toward the altar in the east, reciting a Gloria Patri to greet the
Trinity. That prayer was also a suitable greeting for the Savior after the
Consecration at Mass.^18 Kneeling to pray or express reverence was relatively
new in the thirteenth century, and it was a lay habit (see fig. 48 ).^19 The clergy
chanted their prayers sitting or standing. Priests still made a deep bow to the
cross as a gesture of respect; the lay faithful preferred to kneel. The Francis-
can Salimbene of Parma noted that thirteenth-century layfolk not only knelt
to pray, they were rapidly adopting the single-knee genuflection—especially
at the elevation of the Host.^20 Salimbene’s remarks suggest that not all priests
liked laypeople’s freedom of bodily expression. Better that the laity conform
to clerical styles, like standing for prayer. Popes, however, showed themselves
more open to lay piety. Starting with the reign of Gregory IX ( 1227 – 41 ), the
friend of Saint Francis, images of popes at prayer invariably show them
kneeling with hands folded, the lay posture, in place of the older iconography
showing the pope standing with arms extended, the clerical mode.^21 The
laity eventually won over the clerics: priests adopted the lay genuflection
beginning in the early 1300 s, but it did not become the normal priestly form
of reverence at Mass until the end of the fifteenth century. For the laity,
action and gesture expressed inner prayers and dispositions better than spo-
ken words. After four of his children suddenly died, Raimondo of Piacenza
took his fifth child to the church of Santa Brigitta, where he was accustomed
to hear the Mass and Office. He stood before the great cross on the choir
screen and silently held the child aloft, thereby promising Christ that he
- ‘‘Acta contra Armanum [Punzilupum],’’ 55.
- Zucchero Bencivenni,Sposizione, 84.
- Mantua Stat., 5. 12 , 2 : 96 ; Parma Stat.i(by 1255 ), p. 275.
- Peter the Chanter,De Oratione et Speciebus Illius, The Christian at Prayer,ed. Trexler, 190.
- On the lay love of kneeling, see Pietro Browne, ‘‘L’attegiamento del corpo durante la Messa,’’
Ephemerides Liturgicae 50 ( 1936 ): 404 – 5. - Salimbene,Cronica( 1248 ), 444 , Baird trans., 304. See Trexler,Christian at Prayer, 86 , on the lay
origins of the genuflection. For Peter the Chanter’s views on adoration of the Host, see V. L. Kennedy,
‘‘The Moment of Consecration and the Elevation of the Host,’’Medieval Studies 6 ( 1944 ): 139 – 42. - See, on this shift, Gerhart B. Ladner, ‘‘The Gestures of Prayer in Papal Iconography of the
Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries,’’Didascaliae: Studies in Honor of Anselm M. Albareda, Prefect of the
Vatican Library,ed. Sesto Prete (New York: Rosenthal, 1961 ), 245 – 75.