Introduction 11
spirituality that produced the communal saints began to look suspect and
some of its most revered practitioners dubious. The conservatism, indepen-
dence, and simple-minded rituals of lay spirituality looked unformed and
perhaps adulterated by theological deviance. The mendicants aggressively
directed urban religiosity in new ways. Shrines of dubious saints were de-
stroyed; laypeople who escaped clerical tutelage became suspect. It was the
inquisitors’ harassment of the traditionally orthodox, with their old-fash-
ioned piety and devotions, more than the burning of heretics that fed popu-
lar resentment against the Holy Office. As the civic religion of the Italian
republics was transformed, the homely holiness it nurtured passed into obliv-
ion, but not without protest. My epilogue concludes by recounting a conflict
over orthodoxy that pitched the lay population of Bologna against the Dom-
inican inquisition there in 1299. In the wake of that conflict, the inquisitors
interrogated more than 350 laypersons and investigated, among other things,
the ways in which they conceived of ‘‘practical orthodoxy’’—the beliefs and
practices that led people’s neighbors to consider them members in good
standing of the Catholic community of the city.
These laypeople’s responses to the inquisitor nicely confirmed the image
of day-to-day religiosity I had formed during my research on this project.
This book is itself a homage to the lost holiness of the Italian republics;
I dedicate it to the unexceptional Italian men and women who were its
practitioners.