GoodCatholics atPrayer 351
addressed to the Father in heaven who had adopted us. So the perfect prayer
was the Our Father; it was short and God empowered Christians to use it.
Zucchero Bencivenni explained: ‘‘Adoption is a legal term. That is, accord-
ing to the imperial law, when a man does not have a natural son, he can
select the son of a poor man, if he wishes, and make him an adoptive son,
just as if he was his own son.... This grace God the Father does for us
through no merit of ours, as Saint Paul says. He brought us to baptism,
though we were poor and vile, sons of wrath and hell.’’^56 The Our Father
reminded those who said it of the baptism they had received as children,
which made them children of the Father. The simple baptized could pray
the Pater Noster with as much right as any cleric. By decree of the Lateran
Council, children were to learn by heart, in the Church’s Latin, the Pater
Noster and the Apostles’ Creed. The Apostles’ Creed seems to have played
little or no role in lay devotion, seldom if ever appearing among the prayers
used by confraternities.^57 But Christ himself taught the words of the Pater to
children, to whom belonged the kingdom of heaven (Matt. 19 : 14 , Mark 10 : 14 ,
Luke 18 : 16 ). It was the first prayer a teacher taught his pupils when parents
engaged him to teach them to read. It contained the fullness of beauty and
wisdom.^58 The authority of the Pater Noster was so great that even Cathar
heretics could not abandon it. And they, like the Catholics, dared not trans-
late the sacred words from Latin, at least in Italy.^59 Unlike examples from
France, Italian devotional manuscripts of the communal period almost never
have translations of the Pater, Ave, or Credo.^60 Only at the end of the com-
munal period do vernacular Paters, composed for devotional purposes, ap-
pear. These use tropes and rhymes rather than literal translations of the
sacred words. One fourteenth-century example, perhaps late, went:
When saying, our Father who in the heavens be,
may we hallow always your holy name,
give grace and praise for all to thee;
Make your kingdom come, as is ever meet,
and in all things your will be done,
that our earth heaven in union greet;
Lord, give us this day the bread we need,- Zucchero Bencivenni,Sposizione, 5 – 6 : ‘‘Adozione e
un motto di legge, ch’esecondo la legge
dello’mperadore, quando un uomo non ha veruno figliuolo, elli puote elegger un figliuolo d’un povero
uomo, s’elli vuole, e farne suo figliuolo adottivo, si ch’egli e` avuto per suo figliuolo, e porteranne il
retaggio.... Questa grazia ci fece Dio padre sanza nostro merito, come dice san Paulo, quando elli ci
fece sentire al battesimo ch’eravamo poveri e vili, e figliuoli d’ira e d’inferno.’’ - As noted by De Sandre Gasparini, ‘‘Laici devoti,’’ 256 – 58.
- Zucchero Bencivenni,Sposizione, 3 – 4.
- See Raniero Orioli,Venit Perfidus Heresiarcha: Il movimento apostolico-dolciniano dal 1260 al 1307 ,Studi
storici, 193 – 96 (Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 1988 ), 131 – 33. - On this phenomenon in France, see Alexandre-Bidon, ‘‘Des femmes,’’ 117. For an Italian exam-
ple, see Modena, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria,ms.W. 2. 40 , fol. 4 r.