Chapter Eight
Resurrection and Renewal
Thirteenth-century Christians were made, not born. They were made when,
as children, they were reborn from the womb of the city, the font of the
baptistery in the Mother Church. When the children passed through the
water of the font, they became, like the Israelites passing through the Red
Sea, participants in a covenant with God. As one anonymous commentary
copied about 1200 put it, the Christian’s baptismal renunciation of Satan
and acceptance of the faith of the Church was the Christian equivalent of
the covenant contract between God and the Jewish people at Sinai.^1 Moral-
ists often presented sin—be it personal, such as gluttony, or public, as in
vanity of dress—as a kind of perjury, a violation of the baptismal covenant.^2
In communal Italy, as in most of pre-Reformation Europe, baptism was
performed by immersion.^3 In baptism, the child went down into the tomb
with Christ and rose again, united to the Savior’s death and burial, and so
became part of his living body, the Church, to await his return in glory.^4 The
anonymous Italian commentator made little of baptism as the forgiveness of
sin. He focused on the corporate aspect of the rite, its creation of a people,
the Church. Baptism was a familial and community event—more so than
Mass, Communion, or confession—since it associated the newly baptized
with other Christians.^5 It populated the city and its church. The heresiarch
Fra Dolcino and his followers’ greatest crime, in the mind of the chronicler
of his movement, was not his burning of churches or murder of clergy but
- Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana,msAed. 214 , fols. 49 v– 50 r.
- E.g., Francesco Pipino,Chronicon, 2. 49 , cols. 669 – 70.
- As taken for granted in Jacques of Vitry,Historia Occidentalis, 36 ,p. 196 , and Florence, Biblioteca
Medicea Laurenziana,msConv. Soppr. 145 (xivcent.), Jean of La Rochelle,Summa de Vitiis et Virtutibus,
fol. 145 v. - Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana,msAed. 214 , fol. 51 r.
- As noted by Hay,The Church in Italy in the Fifteenth Century, 25.