Debby abstract

The Cult of St. Clare of Assisi in Early Modern Italy

Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

St. Clare of Assisi (1193-1253) has been experiencing a certain renaissance in recent years, with extensive monographs and editions of her works having been published. Notwithstanding the wealth of visual and literary material attesting to St. Clare's dominant position during the Catholic Reformation, almost nothing has been written on the cult of St. Clare in the Early Modern period. The paper will chart the story of St. Clare beyond the Middle Ages into the modern world as it appears in artistic imagery, hagiographic sources, preached sermons, theatrical performances and religious processions. I shall begin with a discussion of the medieval tradition as an essential background against which to highlight points of innovation and continuity with the Early Modern tradition. The representation of St. Clare appeared in few medieval artistic examples, but thereafter the saint almost "disappeared" for several centuries. The cult of the saint reappeared in the Italian visual tradition at the end of the fifteenth century in isolated examples, and it became especially popular from the late sixteenth century. Thereafter, it was diffused through various media, such as panels, frescoes, drawings and prints. The cult of St. Clare reappeared in Early Modern Italian art due to the activity of Franciscan Observant preachers and, later, Capuchin and Jesuit preachers; they presented St. Clare as a new protector against the Turks, who were threatening Europe at that time. In this context, St. Clare became a Christian crusader heroine defending Christianity against the infidels as a symbol of post-Tridentine Catholic theology and its adoration of the Host. St. Clare was thus no longer depicted as an ascetic mystical saint but rather as an active heroine of Christianity.

Ferzoco abstract

Late Medieval and Early Modern Preaching for Unpopular Cults: The Case of Pope Celestine V

George Ferzoco

University of Bristol

Canonization bulls provided material for bishops and priests throughout Christendom to preach on relevant feast days for new saints, and material from these bulls can be found in sermons. However, not all saints were canonized equally: some had cults that exploded onto the devotional scene, whereas others faltered or failed to attract devotees. One signifier of a ‘failed’ saint’s cult is the comparative paucity of sermons related to him or her. We have well over a thousand different sermons, from the late medieval and early modern periods, dedicated to Francis of Assisi, whereas it is difficult to find any at all dedicated to the feasts of saints such as Peter of the Morrone, more commonly as Pope Celestine the Fifth. Commonly held by modern readers of Dante to be the person identified as ‘he who through cowardice made the great refusal’, we find a majority – but far from a unanimity -- of medieval commentators to have been sympathetic to the figure of an austere holy man who, after sixty years as a hermit, was elected pope only to become the sole person ever to resign that position voluntarily. Strikingly, almost no sermons dedicated to him have survived. This paper will endeavor to explain and illustrate this homiletic curiosity.

Howard abstract

‘Adorabo ad templum sanctum tuum’: Preaching and the Actualization of the Holy in Renaissance Florence

Peter Howard

Monash University

Sometime in the second quarter of the fifteenth century, Fra Antonino Pierozzi OP - prominent reformer and eventually archbishop of Florence – preached on a theme drawn from the 5^th psalm, and explored the meaning of activity proper for churches.  A church, we are told, was not a place for business or chatter, but for a devotion that was both interior and external.  With a veiled reference to two separate, well-known stories - the expulsion of tax collectors and moneylenders from the temple, and of the adolescent Jesus discoursing to the elders in the temple - Fra Antonino instructs his hearers on the context of appropriate behaviour in church. Ecclesiastical space was for teaching and preaching - both verbally and visually – and for devotion.   It was for preachers, artists and devotees.

This prominent and influential preacher draws striking parallels between the methods employed by preacher and artist alike to develop their themes, and goes on to examine the stance of the viewer before an image: “One should adore with the soul through devotion…. with the body by genuflecting, prostrating and suchlike…”.

The proposed paper will examine Fra Antonino’s sermon in detail as a unique entree into the perceptual world of Renaissance Florentines, at least as envisaged by the city’s archbishop.  The study will examine the roots and developments proffered by the preacher’s psychology of representation and its implications for our understanding of developments in devotional art in the fifteenth century.

The study will add further to our understanding of the way in which Florentines understood the actualization of the sacred through visualization at a time when painting in Florence was undergoing rapid change.

Kelly abstract

The Cult of St. Donatus at Benevento

Thomas Forrest Kelly

Harvard University

Donatus, the fourth-century bishop of Arezzo and that city’s patron saint, is venerated widely, but most original liturgical materials are found in the two Tuscan offices known mostly in manuscripts of Arezzo, Florence, and Siena. Owing to the thorough work of Pierluigi Licciardello and Giovanni Alpigiano, the life, the versions of the vita, and the Tuscan offices, are well understood. Recently, another office has been found in a fourteenth-century manuscript of Benevento; this paper will present this office, its relation to the various vitae and other offices, and attempt to understand how the cult of the Tuscan bishop should come to occupy an important place so far from home.

Matter abstract

Lucia Brocadelli: Autobiographical Preacher of the Early Modern Lombard Courts

E. Ann Matter

University of Pennsylvania

Among "Le Sante Vive," the live women saints of early modern Italy, Lucia Brocadelli (d. 1545) is an especially revealing example of women's literacy. This Dominican Penitent was a follower of Savonarola, the Court Prophet of Ferrara, and a favorite of Duke Ercole I d'Este, "Ercole il Magnifico."  She was famous from Italy to Bohemia, and greatly revered in her own time.  Suor Lucia was the author of two autobiographical works: "Seven Revelations," and a "Vita."  The "Revelations" is found in an autograph manuscript in Pavia, and has been published in Italian and translated into English; while the "Vita," extant in a later copy (said to be copied from an autograph) in Bologna, is only now being critically edited.  Both are lively texts, written in an Italian that uses dialect forms, but also quotes Savonarola in Italian and the Bible in Latin, showing the wide range of Lucia's literary habits.  My paper will describe these texts, with particular attention to the format of the manuscripts and the peculiarities of the Italian language used and the Latin Bible quoted.  My goal is to help illuminate what "literacy" meant in Lucia's intellectual and religious context, including her use of sources, and her mastery of different linguistic forms.

McGinn abstract

Mary as Model of Mystical Perfection in the Arnhem Mystical Sermons
Bernard McGinn

University of Chicago (emeritus)

The "Arnhem Mystical Sermons" are a collection of 162 Dutch sermons surviving in a single manuscript now in the Royal Library at the Hague. They were produced in the convent of St. Agnes, a house of Augustinian Canonesses at Arnhem, about the middle of the sixteenth century (ca. 1540-50). Long neglected (though an edition is imminent), these sermons form one of the most interesting collections of late medieval mystical sermons. A prominent feature of the sermons is a form of imitatio Christi based on interiorization of the meaning of the feasts of the liturgical year. Also prominent is a distinctive form of imitatio Mariae, that is, modeling one's interior life on the Virgin as the ideal mystic. This paper will look at the role of Mary in selected sermons in this corpus (several Advent sermons, the Christmas sermons, the one Easter sermon, and especially the sermon for the feast of the Assumption).

Mooney abstract

Reinventing Clare of Assisi in Late Medieval Sermons, Art, and Hagiography

Catherine Mooney

Boston College

Clare of Assisi (c. 1193-1253) has traditionally been known as the female and lesser counterpart of the towering medieval saint, Francis of Assisi.  Recent historical investigations, drawing on Clare’s writings, papal letters, and other historical documents, have challenged her status as the “founder” of the Order of San Damiano, and thrown new light on her struggle to defend her community of San Damiano’s radical poverty and its place alongside Francis’s Lesser Brothers.

Drawing on hagiographic vitae, a vita-panel-painting, and sermons, I will show how this historical Clare was quickly transformed after her death into a fictionalized, ecclesial Clare more amenable to the agendas of the papacy, preachers, and others.