Chapter Six
The City Worships
To be a citizen of the commune was to take part in its corporate life. This
was both an obligation and a right. To belong to the city meant to be part
of a quarter, a neighborhood, and a chapel. Medieval Italians belonged to
the place where they worshiped, where they experienced the sacred rituals
that made them Christians. In the records of the collegiate church of Santa
Maria delle Vigne of Genoa from the 1170 s,parrocchiani,parishioners, be-
longed to the church where they ‘‘heard Mass and Vespers,’’ confessed and
took Communion, and, at marriage, received the nuptial blessing. By the
early 1300 s, participation in the Church’s rites and reception of the sacra-
ments were not simply marks of a parishioner, they were the parishioner’s
diritti,rights. People considered a family a true ‘‘neighbor’’ if their involve-
ment in the local church’s rituals had lasted at least a generation.^1 Only in
1324 do documents at Santa Maria delle Vigne begin to define the parish
geographically.^2 It is notable what rites the documents do not include: bap-
tism and confirmation. Reception of those sacraments joined one to the
Mother Church itself; all received them at the cathedral and its baptistery.
A heretic, the nonneighbor, became so by not participating in worship, by
avoiding the Catholic clergy, and, after Lateraniv, by refusing Easter Com-
munion.^3
This practical understanding of orthodoxy explains the exceeding oddity
of the inquisition penances imposed on convicted heretics in the thirteenth
century. The inquisitor Guido of Vicenza sentenced Zaccaria di Sant’Agata
- A. Boldorini, ‘‘Aspetti e momenti dellaCura Animarumnel basso Medioevo ligure (secc.xiii–xv)
con appendice documentaria,’’Archivum Ecclesiae Ianuensis 1 ( 1981 ): 7 , 33 – 46 , and Geo Pistarino, ‘‘Diocesi,
pievi, e parrocchie nella Liguria medievale (secolixii–xv),’’Pievi e parrocchie,ed. Erba et al., 2 : 656 – 57. - Boldorini, ‘‘Aspetti,’’ 46 – 50.
- On this, see Grado G. Merlo, ‘‘ ‘Cura Animarum’ ed eretici,’’Pievi e parrocchie,ed. Erba et al.,
1 : 551.