WorldWithoutEnd.Amen. 415
The most popular of all Masses for the dead was that on the anniversary
of death.^228 The widow of Count Lodovico of San Bonifacio remembered
his first anniversary by sending a samite and purple pallium for the altar
of the Franciscan house where his Requiem was celebrated.^229 Second in
popularity was the one-month anniversary Mass. Legend had it that Saint
Gregory the Great had prayed the emperor Trajan out of hell after thirty
days of Masses, and this founded the practice of a ‘‘trentine’’ of Masses
leading up to the thirty-day anniversary. That devotion would have a great
vogue in the later Middle Ages, but it had only just started its long career in
the communal period.^230 The one-week and one-month anniversaries were
especially popular with families of the deceased. They provided an opportu-
nity to reaffirm family and neighborhood solidarity in the face of loss. Pious
women gathered on those days for a pianto in the local church.^231 The
wealthy endowed Masses for themselves and their relatives. Rolando Taver-
na, bishop of Spoleto, beautified buildings, including the church of the Holy
Sepulcher in his hometown of Parma. There he installed a chapel with mar-
ble columns and endowed Requiem Masses for his relatives buried there.^232
He combined familial piety with home-city patriotism. Account books of the
Franciscan church in Bologna track the popularity of suffrages for the dead,
since nearly all theentrateare Requiem Mass alms—in a typical recording
period, 19 April to 17 July 1299 , the take was £196 10s., a princely sum for
the poor brothers of Saint Francis.^233
Each Sunday, the parish remembered its dead during the bidding prayers
before the Canon.^234 At Ferrara, when the priest had finished the biddings,
he announced the names of the recently deceased. The congregation knelt
and prayed a Pater and an Ave for each. On the first Sunday of the month,
they said seven Paters and seven Aves for all the faithful departed; whenever
a priest died, they said twelve.^235 In proper proportion, lay Paters could be
just as helpful to the dead as clerical Masses. Among the Dominicans, a
cleric might replace the suffrage of a Requiem Mass with the recitation of
the penitential psalms and the litany. A lay brother’s version of the suffrage
- Sicardo,Mitrale, 9. 50 , cols. 244 – 45 ;Rituale di Hugo [di Volterra], 301 – 20 ;Ordo Senensis, 2. 103 , pp.
509 – 10 ; Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale,msConv. Soppr. D. 8. 2851 , fols. 23 r– 24 v(a monastic
example). - Salimbene,Cronica( 1283 ), 752 – 53 , Baird trans., 524 – 25.
230 .Ordo Senensis, 2. 102 ,p. 509 ; see Gregory the Great,Dialogi, 4. 5 ,Dialogues,ed. and trans. Adalbert
de Vogu ̈e ́(Paris: Cerf, 1978 ), 3 : 33 – 39. - See Ravenna Stat., 341 ,p. 159 ; Modena Stat. ( 1327 ), 2. 46 ,p. 263 ; Lucca Stat. ( 1308 ), 1. 14 ,p. 17.
- Salimbene,Cronica( 1285 ), 865 – 66 , Baird trans., 600 – 601. For another example of a chantry, see
Iscrizioni medievali bolognesi, 334 , no. 38 (San Giacomo Maggiore, 1310 ). - See Bologna, Biblioteca dell’Archiginnasio,msB. 490 ( 1769 , fromxivcent. original), pp. 10 – 11.
- Nicole Lemaıˆtre and Jean-Loup Lemaıˆtre, ‘‘Un test des solidarite ́s paroissiales: Le prie`re pour
les morts dans les obituaires,’’La parrocchia nel Medio Evo,ed. Paravicini Bagliani and Pasche, 260 ; for
other examples of such prayers for the dead, see Jean-Loup Lemaıˆtre,Re ́pertoire des documents ne ́crologiques
franc ̧ais(Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1980 ), nos. 1459 , 1752 , 2182. - Ferrara Clergy Const. ( 1278 ), col. 437.