Chapter Two
From Conversion to Community
The laity of the communes created a spiritual geography of their own along-
side the structures of the parish and diocese. What has been called medieval
‘‘penance culture’’ inspired this creation, although its roots are much older.^1
During the Gregorian Reform, some laypeople in northern Italy were al-
ready seeking a more intense Christian life. By 1200 , these individuals were
calling themselvesconversi(converts) orpenitenti(penitents). The wordconverso
originally denoted a layman who had attached himself to a monastic order
and made a ‘‘conversion of life’’ or an ‘‘oblation’’ of himself. That is to say,
he had become a member of the monastic ‘‘family’’ and served the monks
as lay brother.^2 Strictly speaking, a ‘‘penitent’’ was a person on whom the
Church had imposed public penance for serious sin. More loosely, this was
a layperson who had more or less spontaneously taken up a life of asceticism.
Throughout the 1100 s, single and married people took up a variety of ascetic
practices, sometimes on their own but often under spiritual direction, at a
church or monastery. Documents of the early communal period record ex-
amples of conversi who privately vowed ‘‘conversion of life’’ before their
local priest but continued to live in their homes. By the early 1200 s, the
- On the origins of ‘‘penance culture,’’ see Gilles Ge ́rard Meersseman, ‘‘I penitenti nei secoloxie
xii,’’ Meersseman,Ordo, 1 : 265 – 304 , esp. 304. Bibliography: Gennaro Monti,Le confraternite medievali dell’alta
e media Italia, 2 vols. (Venice: Nuova Italia, 1927 ) (on which, see James M. Powell,Albertanus of Brescia: The
Pursuit of Happiness in the Early Thirteenth Century[Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992 ], 104
n. 5 ); Meersseman,Ordo,and id.,Dossier(on which, see Andre ́ Vauchez, ‘‘Ordo Fraternitatis: Confraterni-
ties and Lay Piety in the Middle Ages,’’Laity in the Middle Ages, 107 – 17 ); Ida Magli,Gli uomini della penitenza:
Lineamenti antropologici del Medioevo italiano(Milan: Cappelli, 1967 ); Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli,Penitenze
nel Medioevo: Uomini e modelli a confronto,Il mondo medievale, 22 (Bologna: Patron, 1994 ); Giovanna Casa- grande,Religiositapenitenziale e citta`al tempo dei comuni(Rome: Istituto Storico dei Cappuccini, 1995 ); and,
for Bergamo, Lester K. Little,Liberty, Charity, Fraternity: Lay Religious Confraternities at Bergamo in the Age of the
Communes(Bergamo: Lubrina, 1988 ). - On monastic conversi in Tuscany, see Duane Osheim, ‘‘Conversion,Conversi,and the Christian
Life in Late Medieval Tuscany,’’Speculum 58 ( 1983 ): 368 – 90.