GoodCatholics atPrayer 375
popular moralizing works have this ‘‘feminist’’ bent certainly suggests that
they would also have appealed to women.
One thing is certain: the mere number of extant manuscripts indicates
that communal readers liked religious literature treating the virtues and giv-
ing edifying exempla for them. Virtues literature collected exempla from
classical authors, pagan philosophers, folklore and legend, the Bible, and
saints’ lives. In the special place it gave to ‘‘good pagans’’ (and their bad
counterparts), virtues literature popularized the reappropriation of classical
knowledge typical of the Aristotelian revival in scholastic theology. What
Saint Thomas Aquinas did for the vices and virtues in the Secunda Secundae
of hisSummafor a clerical audience, theFiorand similar works did for the
laity when they juggled contrasting pairs of vices and virtues.^152 This con-
trasting method appealed to readers. Umilta`of Faenza found it natural to
oppose vices and virtues in sermons to her nuns, as did the otherwise un-
known lay penitent Fra Cristiano, whose letter on the virtues of humility and
fortitude to a‘‘fradelo’’appears in the codex of the vernacular life of Saint
Petronio.^153
One example, the treatment of friendship (amicitia) from theFior di virtu`,
will suffice to give a sense of this literature’s form and tone.^154 The treatment
comes in the middle of the section listing the different kinds of love and their
opposing vices. First, the author defines friendship: it is the kind of love
that makes unrelated individuals want to be together (stare insieme). This is
experiential and not very philosophical. But the author also knows that Aris-
totle divided the virtue of friendship three ways, so he gives three reasons for
wanting to be together: mere utility, cooperation in some project, and desire
for the other’s good. This is an interesting reworking of Aristotle’s division
of friendship: a union in pursuit of the useful, the pleasurable, or the good.
Pleasure has become business; the good pursued is no longer philosophical
abstraction, but moral growth. In each section, after defining and dividing
the virtue or vice, the author gives exemplary stories and aphorisms—the
‘‘authorities.’’ For friendship, there are no stories, but there are some fine
tags. These come from Solomon (friends help friends in adversity), Aristotle
(people are social beings), Cicero (even heaven’s glory would be sad without
a friend there), Plato (test your friends), and finally the canon law in Gratian’s
Decretum(friendship with bad people is bad). Not only has the virtue been
adapted to the way a person in the world (as opposed to a monk or philoso-
pher) might experience it, but the reader has been equipped with pithy say-
ings to call to mind when trying to practice it. Is theFior di virtu`a ‘‘religious’’
work? Not if ‘‘religious’’ restricted its use to the cloister or the altar. If saintli-
- See Casagrande, ‘‘Moltiplicazione,’’ 267 , on the pairing of vices and virtues.
- E.g., Umilta`of Faenza, ‘‘Sermo 2 ,’’ 18 ; Fra Cristiano’s letter is in Corti,Vita, 53 – 58 (i.e., Bolo-
gna, Biblioteca Universitaria,ms 2060, fols. 21 v– 23 v). - Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria,ms 158, fols. 26 r–v; for a translation, seeFlorentine Fior di Virtu,
9 – 11.