Resurrection andRenewal 313
on the two great feasts, and these became the days of the ‘‘solemn bap-
tisms.’’^25
Outlying communes and villages in the contado had their own baptismal
fonts, if they were pievi.^26 In the country, the pievano, the ‘‘parish priest,’’
was properly the archpriest who governed the clergy serving a baptismal
church. That church had a stone font large enough for the immersion of
children (fig. 28 ). The archpriest was to teach new godparents their Pater
Noster and Credo if they did not know them. He sat on a throne in the apse
of his church, the image of the bishop at his cathedral.^27 But he was emphati-
cally not the bishop, and although he might baptize, he did so only as the
bishop’s delegate. That he had to come every year to the cathedral on Holy
Thursday to get the holy oils for baptism and the sick showed his subordinate
and delegated position.^28 Sacramentally, pievi were extensions of the Mother
Church, the sole giver of spiritual life of citizens. The communal period
slowly ended the independence of pievi close to the city. At Bergamo in 1197 ,
the canons of the cathedral, led by the archdeacon Guasco, brought a suit
against the priests Vifredo of Sant’Andrea, Lanfranco of San Salvatore, Alb-
erico of San Michele dell’Arco, Guala of Sant’Eufemia, Lanfranco of San
Lorenzo, Giovanni of Sant’Alessandro in Colonna, Alberto of Sant’Alessan-
dro della Croce, and Giovanni of San Michele del Pozzo, to stop their inde-
pendent baptizing on Easter and Pentecost. Bishop Lanfranco forbade those
eight priests, and all other clergy of the district, to baptize anywhere but in
the city font. Furthermore, there were to be no baptisms on the vigils of
Easter and Pentecost save those performed at the Mother Church. The
clergy were to come with their people to the ‘‘solemn baptisms’’ at the
duomo. To justify these restrictions of time and place, Archdeacon Guasco
had recourse to ancient patristic authorities, such as Tertullian of Carthage.^29
Such a centralization process seems to have been successful throughout
communal Italy—so successful that, at Siena, legislation stipulated that some
of the ‘‘great multitude’’ of children needing baptism accumulated during
the year might be baptized outside the two great feasts to make the ceremon-
ies of the vigils more workable. But the indult for baptisms at other times did
not apply to the two great feasts themselves. At those times, all baptisms
were to be at the duomo.^30 So persistent was the tradition of solemn baptisms
on Easter and Pentecost vigils that, even after the sixteenth-century liturgical
reforms of the Council of Trent, the liturgical books required that no bap-
25 .Ordo Senensis, 1. 175 , pp. 155 – 56 ; 185 , pp. 168 – 69.
26. For bibliography on this topic, see L. Mascanzoni,Pievi e parrocchie in Italia: Saggio di bibliografia
storica, 2 vols. (Bologna: n.p., 1988 – 89 ).
27. Brentano,Two Churches, 68 – 73.
28. Enrico Cattaneo, ‘‘Il battistero in Italia dopo il Mille,’’Miscellanea Gilles Ge ́rard Meersseman,ed.
Maccarrone et al., 1 : 186.
29. Giuseppe Ronchetti,Memorie istoriche della citta`e chiesa di Bergamo(Bergamo: Natali, 1805 ), 3 : 207 – 8.
30 .Ordo Senensis, 1. 119 ,p. 105.