WorldWithoutEnd.Amen. 417
daily for them.^244 Associations updated their necrologies regularly, and some
of these continued in use for over a hundred years. The necrology of the
Ospedale of Reno near Bologna includes names of lay penitents and clerics
in equal number. The hospital continued to add names throughout the com-
munal period—in over a hundred different hands.^245 Some of the most elab-
orate suffrages come from flagellant statutes in the later communal period,
but these are probably no different from earlier, lost legislation. The Pavia
battutihad two annual suffrages for the dead, on the feast of their patron
Saint Agatha and on the feast of the Assumption of Mary. They gathered
on each for a Requiem and recited together twenty-five Paters and Aves.
They had a weekly Mass of the dead, too; members who could not attend it
said fifty Paters and Aves instead.^246
Suffrages always included almsgiving, that most powerful of good works
for souls in purgatory. Even the priests did not rely on Mass alone. Feeding
the poor made the banquet of heaven visible here on earth. At Ravenna,
annually on 4 June, the clergy fed twelve paupers in memory of the deceased
benefactors and patrons of their churches.^247 The annual meal for the dead
was especially a family event. People ate and prayed for their dead parents
and relatives, and most also provided something for the poor. Donna Gia-
cobba di Don Bonadio of Careno considered it perfectly orthodox that the
friends of the dubious Guglielma of Milan meet at her tomb forconviviain
her memory on the date of her death.^248 Hints in sumptuary legislation at
Siena suggest that memorial banquets on the anniversary of death were a
vital part of lay commemoration of the dead.^249 As the community prayed
and remembered the dead, it reaffirmed the link between theCitade Sancta
here on earth and its fulfillment in the celestial Jerusalem to come.
- Pisa Stat.i, pp. 705 – 6.
- The necrology is edited in Bocchi, ‘‘Necrologio,’’ 121 – 32 ; on this book, see ibid., 65 – 86.
- Milan, Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense,msAC.viii. 2 , fols. 10 v, 36 r; cf. also Piacenza, Biblioteca
Comunale,msPallestrelli 323 , fols. 17 r– 20 r; Novara Battuti Stat. (xiv), 280. - Ravenna Council ( 1311 ), 4 ,p. 453.
- The inquisitors of her cult found nothing odd in this:Atti inquisitoriali [contro i Guglielmiti],esp.
- 33 , 3. 8 , pp. 190 , 218.
- Siena Stat.ii( 1310 ), 5. 212 – 14 , 2 : 321 – 22.