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A. Bagliani and N, Şenocak, "A People's Church: Medieval Italy and Christianity, 1050-1300" (Cornell UP, 2023)
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A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Lauren Fonto, and today I'm pleased to be talking to Associate Professor Neslihan Szenochuk and Professor Maureen Miller. Professor Szenochuk is one of the editors of People's Church, Medieval Italy and Christianity 1050-1300, which is edited by Professor Agostino Paravicini Bagliani and Associate Professor Neslihan Chinochak. Professor Miller is a contributor to the book and historian of Medieval Europe. So welcome to the show and I'd like to start by asking you both to please introduce yourselves to the listeners by telling us where you grew up and studied and how you came to be involved with this book.
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C
Okay, I'll go ahead first. First of all, thank you very much, Lauren, for having us on this podcast. Just a very brief introduction. About Me I started studying history while I was in Turkey. Actually, I wasn't in. My undergraduate was in industrial engineering, but once I finished industrial engineering, I didn't MA and then a PhD in medieval history in Turkey and then worked briefly for two years in Cyprus and after that accepted an offer at Colombia. And since then teaching medieval history at Colombia. And I specialize in religious history of the Middle Ages. Great.
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A
And I grew up in the Washington, D.C. area. My family took a brief swerve to New Jersey when I was in high school, but I was intent upon getting heading back to Washington, D.C. and I only applied to colleges there. I went to the American University as an undergraduate, thinking I was going to be a journalist. And that didn't work out. I found other things I was interested in, particularly history. And the courses of one particularly influential professor, Terry Murphy, had me swerve toward the Middle Ages. I started the languages and everything, everything late, since journalism doesn't require Latin. And so I went to Catholic University for an MA and from there had the very great honor and privilege to work with David Herlihy when he was at Harvard. And since then I've had a number of jobs. My first job was out at Hamilton College. Then I got back to D.C. again and taught at George Mason University for five years and came out here to California to teach at UC Berkeley. And that's where I still am today and I shall retire soon from.
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B
Well, thank you for the introductions. So the next question I'd like to ask is that for those unfamiliar with Italian medieval history, what makes medieval Italy unique in Europe, including ordinary people's involvement in religious affairs?
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C
You want to go ahead Maureen? Sure.
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A
I think what's really unique about the history of the church in Italy is, I mean, obviously first, the oldest see in Europe, Rome is in Italy. And so there is this role of the papacy in the peninsula. But I think more formative is simply.
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C
The.
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A
Urbanization, the rich carpet of cities all over Italy, which is, I mean, it's the most urbanized part of Western Europe. And a lot of the vibrancy in Christianity in Italy, I think comes from this dense carpet of cities and the way, the development of the church there. So those are the two things I would point to. But Nestle, you're probably better positioned to talk about the activities of everyday people and their role.
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C
Yeah. Building on what Maureen said, yes, there is a big urbanization, but also a very interesting factor in Italy is that most of these cities are city states. So people are actually involved in the day to day politics. They participate in the politics. And in a way I think that trickles also to their involvement with the Church. That is, they are sort of people who are used to, you know, being in the decision making positions. So they do demand the best from their clergy they can. You know, they are very autonomous in certain ways. For example, you have a number of religious movements that start in Italy, very important religious moments, like for example, the Franciscan Order, or you have this very interesting phenomenon that we have with the order called Humiliati, that for the first time an order has come with three different branches where you have the clergy, you have the male order, the female order, and also what we call the third order, which is ordinary people living their lives according to a rule. That's an order that came up in north of Italy, around Milan. And then you have very interesting monastic movements, quite strict and austere and ascetic, like Vallombroso or Camaldo Leze. These are especially Italian orders. So it's extremely rich, I would say, in terms of the forms of religious devotion that you see. But also another draw for me and Maureen, we are specializing especially on Italian religious history, is the richness of the archives. There are so many, so many local archives in Italy. It's not centralized, the medieval records. So you can go to a city and find, you know, a huge trove of material about medieval religious life. So that makes Italy a really exciting place.
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A
Yeah, I certainly, I'd like to add, I mean, I certainly chose to study Italy for exactly that reason because there's an unbroken notarial tradition in Italy from the Roman Empire, you know, straight on through the Middle Ages. And I was interested in the, you know, sort of history from the ground up, Annal's history. And Italy is the best place to try to write that because these notarial documents reveal the names of lots of individuals. I mean, they are mainly dealing with property, but you get much further down the social scale. It's not just elites you can study and come to understand through these documents.
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B
Yes, that's very interesting. So the next question is in relation to chapter two. Yes. And we're. I'd like to discuss the influence of the events on the Norman territorial expansion into southern Italy and the broadening of the influence of the papacy in Europe in particular. What created an ideal environment for the Latinization of diocese in the south of Italy?
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A
Well, the Norman territorial conquest of Italy, first of all, was very slow and piecemeal project. And obviously they only really establish themselves in the south. I think that the chief importance of the Normans is the way that they bring. And I'm drawing here on the work of a wonderful doctoral student who's just completed his degree, Peter McKelly, who did for his dissertation, a huge study of the archdiocese of body. And what he demonstrates is that basically the Normans bring French customs of making lay people making donations to various religious institutions. Before that, in southern Italy, it's really part of the Byzantine Empire. And in the Byzantine world, it was such a powerful state that basically the Church received what funding the state gave it. But when the Normans come in, they give immense donations to religious institutions, which makes both monasteries bishops. They really establish a landed patrimony for these institutions. So I would say that the most important impact on the Church would be the way that the Normans endow religious institutions in terms of the broadening influence of the papacy. Papacy tries to make friends sort of with the Normans. The Normans defeat them decisively in the 11th century. And the papacy is really quite dependent on the Normans. They make a very. What the papacy had to offer the Normans was legitimacy because the popes were longtime figures of authority within the peninsula. And so basically, by legitimizing the Norman rulers, they form this alliance with the Norman kingdom. And the Norman does come in. The Normans do come in and aid the papacy at several key moments in its history. But the papal expansion of power is really, I mean, they have these huge theoretical claims based on the, you know, the donations made by the Carolingian rulers, but they're really only making good on it in the 13th century and really more in the 14th century. So, I mean, they're there, they're Constantly trying to expand and extend their reach, but they're not as powerful an influence until really the period of the Renaissance. In terms of Latinization. I mean, the Norman gifts to Latin rite churches definitely fosters Latinization, but Greek Christianity doesn't die away or wither away. I mean, there are still Greek churches throughout the south. And I mean, they continued to exist. I don't think it was ever really total, but the Norman expansion did, certainly by enriching the Latin Church and forming this relationship with the papacy, set the stage for Latinization over time.
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B
Thank you for that explanation. So in chapter three, I found it interesting to learn more about how the various Italian dioceses were governed by bishops and how this form of governance was challenged with Florence as a case study of this phenomenon and challenged by the emergence of communal governance structures in the 11th and 12th centuries. How was this transition period negotiated between the Florentine sea and the communal governments?
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A
Basically, the heyday of church power, or the power of bishops, is the period of the reform movement in the 11th century and into the early 12th century. But the basis of that episcopal power is basically in the collapse of the late Roman state. In the 5th century, bishops were the only recognized public officials in their cities. And they ended up picking up basically a lot of the duties of secular government, like helping to maintain the walls and the aqueducts. And a lot of the expansion of their powers was simply out of poor relief. Bishops were traditionally responsible for poor relief, but that meant you knew how to provision the city. And it's really from those activities that the power, they become sort of by default, the public officials and their towns. When the communes emerge, I mean, Florence is a little bit on the late side. The most powerful communes emerge in the late 11th century. Think of Pisa. And the emergence of the communes is very much linked to the battle between Pope Gregory VII and Emperor Henry iv. And in this period of the investiture conflict, when throughout Italy, particularly northern Italy, it's not clear which side you should be on. And there's really sort of doubt about who the legitimate authority is during that crisis. And the communes there or emerge to basically keep order. And they're sworn private associations among leading citizens mainly, there's usually a large merchant component as well as the local nobility. And they usually are collaborating with the bishop in their early history, and that's where they learn really about governance, since bishops had been basically exercising functions of government in these cities. The transition in Florence, the sea, was normally powerful, but it's not one of the most powerful in terms of wealth and Public authority as other cities. And the early collaboration between the See and the Commune begins to shift when leading families in the countryside start taking over more aggressively across the 12th century and into the 13th, taking over ecclesiastical lands. And the Florentine Commune basically comes to the aid of the bishop in defending the bishop's property. But soon enough, they actually are simply just taking over that property too. And so what begins as a collaboration becomes the triumph of the Commune, mainly because the Commune was able to organize its military and exert military power, project military power into the countryside more effectively than bishops, and you can trace this in more or less similar fashions across other sees.
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B
That's all very interesting indeed. And now I'd like to discuss the institution of the Pieve, which I understood to be the jurisdiction of a baptismal church, upon which private churches and so on were dependent. So this institution fulfilled various functions, from being a place of worship to a hospital and a school. What characteristics made the Pieve a key institution within medieval Christian life in northern and central Italy? And what made it unique compared to the rest of Europe? And also what was. If we could also discuss their judicial structure and relationship with the bishops?
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C
Yes, I'll take that question, because I have written the chapter on the Pieve in this volume. To me, when I first encountered the Pieve, it came across as a really interesting religious structure that you don't really see in the rest of Europe. So they are parish churches, they are the center of parish life. But PIEVE generally is a bigger church that can also house more people. Like, physically, it tends to be a big church. And you can think of the land around the Pie, where, like sort of a mini diocese. That is, every diocese is divided into territories with one Pieve church being the head church in that territory. And it makes the job of the clerical organization and organization of sacramental religious life much easier, because the bishops basically only correspond with the head priest in the Pieve, which we call in Italian, Pievano, or the arch priest, is another name that is used, and then that person is then responsible for the smaller churches in its own territory, in the territory of the Pieve. So, for example, when the bishops do their visitations, and bishops do visitations on a yearly basis in their diocese, they simply go to the piera. They don't actually visit the smaller churches. That is the job of the arch priest of the Pier to visit the small churches. So it also acts as a center of clerical education. It has a library generally, it houses liturgical books. For example, when any priest in one of the Smaller dependent churches needs books or needs to be educated better in Latin so that the priests can use the liturgical texts that. That is where they go. They go to pme. They are baptismal churches, Lauren, as you mentioned, which means that the smaller churches really do not have baptismal pond until very late. You know, which you see that parish structure where you can be baptized in a small parish church in Germany already in the 12th, 13th centuries, but not in Italy. In Italy, people come to the PV or they come to the bishop's cathedral in order to be baptized. So they offer basically a full range of what we would call pastoral services. And again, people who want to hear a good sermon might come to Pieve on Sunday rather than their small church. And generally, they really tend to be sort of in the middle of that, that territory of the pieves. So people can still, you know, relatively, with ease, travel there. So in a way, I think it makes the Italian religious organization much easier having a structure like that. There is something in France similar to that, the archdeaconries and the archdeacon, which sort of more or less corresponds to the role of Pievano or the archbishop, arch priest of Pievan, but it is much more pronounced in Italy, this kind of structure.
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B
Well, thank you for your explanation of that particular religious structure. So for the next question, I'd like to talk about how, in the context of monasteries, in what ways did land and wealth circulate through these institutions? And in what ways did the relationships between monasteries and the local aristocracy influence these circulations of wealth over time?
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A
So if I could jump in here, the monasteries are fascinating institutions that I have to point out here to go back to your first question about what's distinctive about Italy. St. Benedict, you know, basically founded monasticism in the west, you know, in Subiaco, by going, you know, fleeing Rome and going to a cave outside of the city. And the tradition of monastic life that he established through writing his rule that became basically taken up by the Carolingians and spread further. It is really the Benedictine monasticism is the dominant form of the religious life, certainly in early medieval life. And then after the millennium, you get much more diversity, both within traditions of Benedictine monasticism, but also other new types of new interpretations of the religious life. What lay people wanted from monasteries was prayers, and they made donations of lands in order to ensure that the monastic community offered prayers on the behalf for the salvation of their souls and those of their deceased relatives. And I would say here that lay people, in terms of this kind of sensible, in some ways, division of labor, you know, monks were Expert prayers. And they did it at various times across the day and night. And by paying basically monks to pray for as expert prayers for your deceased relatives and ensure their salvation, you could devote yourself to the world and the secular life that you were living. And lay people tended to value or see the prayers of monks, since they could devote themselves full time to prayer as more valuable in terms of the economy of salvation. Whereas parish priests, their local parish priests basically had a lot of duties in the world, both supporting themselves, but also ministering to their parishioners. And although their ministries were deeply appreciated, lay people who could afford to make donations of land to monasteries preferred these more expert full time prayers, so to speak, because monasteries accrue these huge patrimonies. And the one I know best is Cava de Terraini, which still has one of the most amazing monastic archives still in situ at the monastery, which is just north of Salerno, up in the hills. And since they have all these lands, basically they. To have them generate wealth, you have to basically develop an administration and collect rents, which are often paid in coin or in kind. But they became then concentrations of both coin and food resources, and therefore they begin to play a huge role in the economy. And this tie between the sort of local aristocracy, aristocracy and monasteries remains very strong throughout the Middle Ages, even as new religious movements emerge. Benedictine monasticism remains a very powerful force simply because of their huge patrimonies. They're also centers of education for the entire Middle Ages. So that's basically the socioeconomic and religious relationship between the aristocracy and monasteries.
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B
Thank you for explaining those particular circulations of land and wealth. It's certainly very interesting. The influence of Cistercian orders, I hope I pronounced that correctly, on the organization of religious life is another part of the book I found interesting. And how did these orders come to influence Ikelian religious life? And what background factors such as geography, politics, et cetera, influenced the waxing and waning of their influence over the medieval period?
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A
Well, if I could start out, and then maybe I'll. You probably know a lot more about Cistercians than I do, but certainly Kava is a really good example of how even before the Cistercians, great sort of reforming monastic movements in northern Europe come to influence religious life in Italy. So the monastery of Cluny was founded in the 10th century as a reformed monastery, trying to live a more austere religious life. And because of the relationship I just outlined, laypeople really saw the fate of the souls of their relatives and ultimately themselves, on the purity of The. The prayers and the regularity of the offering of those prayers. The lay aristocracy was big supporter. They were big supporters of reform. So Clooney becomes wildly popular, and other aristocrats encourage their local monasteries to become affiliated. So you have a whole reforming congregation of Cluny spread out all over Europe, and it comes to Italy. In fact, CAVA is a Cluniac foundation. Its founder, Alfario, first, when he took up religious life, he just went out to a cave. But then he met a Cluniac and ended up going to Cluny for a while, brought the Cluniac way of life to Kava. And then Kava, like Cluny, becomes a huge network of affiliated monasteries throughout southern Italy. So the Cistercians, I would see them as simply another version of a northern reformy movement that does come to Italy, come to be known in Italy, and then acquired many affiliates. My understanding is the Stricians are most powerful in the north, that the Cluniac and the Kava monasteries are very powerful in the south. But, Nazli, whatever you want to add to that.
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C
Yeah, just a few words. I mean, this. Cistercian monasteries in Italy really start off with this visit of very famous Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvo, who comes to north Italy and sort of makes an impact there. And after that, you see the proliferation of the Cistercian monasteries in Italy. And there is this Italian scholar, Guido Cariboni, who has actually published a monograph on the Cistercian order in Italy. What is very. Maybe, I mean, as Maureen said, that this relationship of the monks to the outside world is already very strong in the Middle Ages in general. But with the Cistercians, there is a group of lay people around them that support the monastery. They are called familiares or familia monastica. And they participate in very special liturgies within the monastery. And in return, they make donations and sort of. It's like a confraternity around the monastery in a way. But really, I mean, not just distortions. Every monastery in Italy, they energize the lay life around them. I mean, people are attracted to these structures. They are attracted to seeing these men and women who have dedicated and devoted their lives to prayer. It's a phenomenon that leaves deep influences. And monasteries also tend to represent a more pure religious life, maybe compared to the life of secular clergy. So therefore, they also become a source of attraction for the laity, I would say.
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B
All right, so to circle back to our earlier question about where we had the introduction, you could add, if you like, you could add on to that question to give a bit of background on how this book came into being? Yes.
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C
So it already started when I was a fellow in Ville, it in Florence. Ville, it's the Harvard University center for Renaissance Studies. It's in Florence. And yearly they give fellowships to scholars to come and do studies there. And when I was there, I met Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, who is really one of the leading historians of the Middle Ages in Italy and a really wonderful scholar and a very nice man. And when we were talking, I mentioned to him that to me it seemed like the medieval Italian religious history is lesser known in the USA than compared to England, France, Germany. And there are historical reasons for that. For a very long time, French and German has always been the languages that are taught in the PhD programs. But of course there are giants in the field, one of them being Warren Miller. And thanks to their job, their work for that. There is more now knowledge of the medieval Italy in the usa. But I said it would be great if they could produce a volume that would act like an introduction or undergrads or grads or anybody who does not really know much about medieval Italian religious history. I suggested this to him, that we make a book together in the English language, but we also incorporate especially the work of Italian scholars, because obviously there are wonderful Italian scholars, but most of the time they write in Italian, so their work is not accessible to the English speaking audiences. So what we did is that we sat down and decided the chapters, what each topic, each chapter is going to be, what would be the topics that there is especially of interest here. And then we started thinking of the experts in Italy and in the English speaking world who can write this chapter the best. And so we reached out to those authors and we said to them, you know, could you please produce us an essay on the subject and a general essay that, you know, does not bring about maybe argumentative or interpretive problems, but summarizes the field, summarizes the knowledge there. And that's how it happened. So the Italian scholars all wrote in Italian and we basically translated all that into English. And we also had the English speaking contributors, Maureen Miller being one of them, Francis Andrews and George Tameron, who are also very well known names in this field. And that's how the book has come about.
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B
Well, thank you for that explanation. So to go on to the next question about the book chapters themselves. So now I would like to talk about the role of the confraternities in the 13th century and whether the Papacy's attitude to these groups was generally negative or positive.
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C
During this period, I actually published also an article on the 12th century Confraternities in Italy. So confraternities, again, are a very interesting religious structure, and they are incredibly numerous in medieval Italy. You have them elsewhere in Europe, too. Definitely. It's not just an Italian phenomenon, but for Italy, we have better records, actually, concerning the confraternities, although mostly they have been studied for the Renaissance period. What we say confraternity can mean a number of things. As Marina Gazzini, in her article on confraternities in this volume explains. It's basically most of the time, when we say a lay confraternity, we mean the ordinary people in a city or even in a village coming together and creating an association for prayer and certain other services that can be. For example, when one of them gets sick, the other members take care of them. When one of them dies, the burial involves all the members of the com fraternity. And there is a lot of prayer made at such a burial ceremony or a funeral. But apart from that, they usually meet at very regular intervals, most often a month in a church and have a meal together. They celebrate the Eucharist together, and one of them gives a sermon to the rest. There are certain dues also involved, that is, you have to pay an initial amount of money to enter home fraternity. But, you know, it's sort of very similar to trade guilts too. And sometimes, actually the distinction between the two blurs, whether a trade guild looks more like a confraternity, because the intensity of the religious services that are going on. However, one should not think of confraternities only as a phenomenon of the lay people. You have clerical confraternities that are, again, very, very popular in Italy. We also have a chapter on that in the book written by Antonio Rico. And that is the clergy, I guess, not being satisfied with the normal sacramental life there. They come together in confraternities, and again, just likely, people, they pray for one another, they celebrate the Eucharist together. And then there are mixed confraternities, that is, confraternities maybe that have been initiated by the clergy. For example, we talked about pieve. Sometimes the arch priest of the PIEVE is responsible for starting a confraternity in his own little plebatum, that is, the mini diocese around the pie. They offer the church as a place for gathering, and then the lay people join, and together with the clergy again, they pray, they celebrate the Eucharist in set regular terms. So it is really a very interesting phenomenon, but it also shows that, you know, people are not just content simply going to the church and Sunday and, you know, receiving the Eucharist. They want to do more. They want to dedicate more of their time, more of their money to the religious services. And there are literally hundreds of ways of doing that. If you're a layperson in medieval Italy, you can approach to a monastery, support them, enter in a monastic fraternity, you can enter into a lay confraternity, and it's just another way of religious devotion.
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B
Certainly an interesting religious or lay phenomenon indeed. Just to go back to the last part of my question, did the papacy then have a positive or negative attitude to these confraternities in general throughout the medieval period?
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C
Well, actually, there is not that much record of papacy interfering with these confraternities in any way. They are very local. Even the bishops do not seem to be ever in any particular way bothered by the confraternities or feel threatened by them because they are not permanent structures anyway. They're just groups of people who come together once a month and do prayers together. It sort of in no way constitutes in some way a threat to the clerical authority or anywhere. So therefore, I cannot think of in any case where the papacy has a clash with these confraternities. There are very different types of confraternities also. I should say that. Well, one of them is what I explained what this generalities are, the prayer confraternities. They can be dedicated to a particular saint. Some of them are dedicated to elaborate liturgy with a bit devotion to Virgin Mary. But then there are also what we call the penitential confraternities. Our listeners might have heard of the people who have, who are flagelling themselves in the Middle Ages. So this, they are called in Italian flagellanti. In fact, they whip themselves going around in the streets. So these are called also in Italian disciplinati, another name given to them because the stick with which they were beating themselves is called actually disciplina, from which comes the word discipline in English. So, I mean, those confraternities tend to be more on the ascetic way. But even with those, you know, you don't see real clashes between the clerical literature, authority and the confraternities. Actually, confraternities are most likely to be under the ages of the communal governments, the city governments and the city governments actually support these confraternities. They make donations. The confraternities themselves collect money to establish new churches. And the reason why Renaissance confraternities is studied so much is because they would pay for to the artists, Renaissance artists, to do frescoes in their own churches, confraternity churches. So they have been great patrons of art during the Renaissance period in Italy.
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B
Thank you for that explanation. And another overarching thread from the book that I found interesting was how power was negotiated in the context of religious leaders around medieval Italy. When it comes to candidates for the papacy, there seemed to be a number of anti popes who appeared during the medieval period. Was this period in Italy a particularly significant time of interreligious conflict? And did the struggles of popes versus anti popes recede with the ending of the medieval period?
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A
I think you have to look at the role of papacy in Italy over the long and over the early Middle Ages. The papacy as an institution is actually relatively weak. We have papal letters, but the papacy is reacting to inquiries throughout, you know, that arrive to it from areas being missionized in northern Europe and from religious, from bishops and laypeople throughout the peninsula as well. A massive change happens. I guess you could first see a politicization of the papacy during the 10th century when elite baroni, aristocratic families in Rome, basically because lay people had given St. Peter's the papacy so much of land, they came to dominate the papacy. And it's considered the 10th century is considered the low point of papal history because these contending Roman families would put a family member in. And so very few of them died natural deaths. And some of them were considered scandalously immoral. And this kind of condition of the papacy leads to movements for reform. And so across the 11th century, you have the building reform really starts in northern Europe. It starts outside of the papacy with monastic reform, then leading to lay people wanting to reform the quality of religious life in their own churches. And it does reach the papacy, with particularly the papacy of Gregory vii, who was a monk. And it's through this movement for reform in the 11th century that the papacy really develops rapidly as an institution. And many of the institutions that we think are normal to the papacy. So, for example, you know, the popes, how they became pope. I mean, if you read the libi pontificalis, sometimes they're elected in the 10th century. Definitely. It's just noble families putting in sometimes their idiot nephews onto the papal throne. But it's in this reform movement that the College of Cardinals goes from being simply cardinals having liturgical roles in the various stational masses across the liturgical year in Rome, to the College of Cardinals being the body that elects popes. And so that's just one indicator of the kind of institutional growth that's happening. And the papacy, in its dedication to reform from Gregory VII really develops its own outward pushing policies. So instead of simply responding to inquiries from without Europe, it becomes really a much more active, active force. And because now you have this much more activist papacy and this body of the College of Cardinals being able to elect the combination of those factors does lead to disagreements in elections. And that's how you end up with popes versus anti popes. Usually when there's some division in the College of Cardinals, you end up with to popes, they appealed to different secular rulers supporting them. And obviously the biggest example of this comes with the great Western schism in the 14th century, which was peculiar because it lasted so long. Most of these papal schisms are resolved within a couple of years, but the great Western schism went on for close to half a century. But I can't speak really about the modern period, but really the modern period where we sort of end the Middle Ages is with the Protestant Reformation, or at least that's a classic sort of breaking point. And the papacy really goes to being the sort of leader of, you know, needing to reform, undertake internal reforms, what's known as the Catholic reform Reformation of the late Middle Ages, but then, you know, more actively responding to Protestant critiques of the Church. And yeah, that's not my area of specialty. Arbonhum stuck to the Middle Ages. So there may well have been schisms. I don't know about them.
- [47:38]
C
Well, I mean, they do continue into the 15th century. And you have this movement in fact then coming up, the conciliarism, where I mean, the Council of Basel in 1439 elects an anti pope. And they really bring up this argument whether it is the pope who should be the head of the church or whether it is the gathering of the bishops in a council. I mean, so it really goes on into the later periods as well. This problem of schism in the papal elections and where the authority really lies, with whom it lies.
- [48:16]
B
Well, that's very interesting and an interesting set of happenings over the medieval period and continuing into the modern period. So lastly, I just like to ask what projects both of you are working on at the moment.
- [48:37]
C
So my current project is really very exciting to me and that shows the kind of nerd I really am. So I'm very interested in the church governance and ruling of the people that is done by the church officials themselves. But, but that sort of. So my project is called a History of Pastoral Power, Bishops, Abbots and Kings. And it's a giant very Ambitious project. I didn't mean it to be that way. But it starts with basically the New Testament, the incarnation of Jesus Christ. And he's seen as. I mean, he refers to himself as the good shepherd in the Bible. And this idea of the ruling as a form of shepherding, from which comes the word pastor, you know, pastor, meaning in Latin, shepherd. And that's what bishops were called late antiquity and in the Middle Ages, and still they are called as such. But this idea of the ruler of the Christian people as a shepherd with certain particular specifics attached to it. For example, it says it's ruling, but at the same time, it's a service, and it's very sacrificial. It can be because, you know, a shepherd, a good shepherd, has to lay down their life for the people. And then from. It starts with the bishops being identified as shepherds after the ascension of Jesus Christ, and then goes on to the monastic movements. The abbots are also called shepherds because they do shepherding of the monks under their charge. And then with the conversion of Constantine, the Roman emperor, he also takes on this idea of the shepherding. And we have his words saying that he sees himself as a bishop, too. And such a role is also ascribed to him by the contemporary church writers, actually writers of the church history, like you say, beauty. So I try to follow up this idea of the pastoral ruling, what it means to rule Christian people. If I can manage to do that. I have written the first four centuries, but now I have to move on to the Middle Ages. And of course, later on, the Pope emerges as the supreme pastor, the most important pastor over these bishops, abbots and kings. But the idea that a king is also some kind of shepherd never really dies out. And I think in many of the aspects of the Church life that we have talked today, the emperors feel entitled to interfere with the decisions of the Church, not always out of corruption, but out of this tradition that comes from Constantine onwards, that they see themselves also as shepherds of people. So that's my project.
- [51:37]
A
So I'm. Presently, I got to the place I've been concentrating on now, a little Umbrian town called Citta di Castello, as part of a bigger project, which was.
- [51:51]
C
And I suppose is.
- [51:53]
A
Though I've gotten sort of a detour about the documentary change from keeping records on single sheets of parchment to keeping them in registers or in codex form. And in the process of that research, I was following a wonderful little article by my predecessor at Berkeley, Bob Brentano, who had written an article about the bishop's Books of Citta di Castello. And off I went to Citta di Castello. And it's bishop's books are enormous. And they had just had them restored and fully digitized and basically gave me 10 volumes of episcopal records. And I have to say I was just really infatuated with this small town in that it's. I mean, I've encountered wonderful archivists and librarians throughout Italy, though I have to say, working on ecclesiastical history. Sometimes, especially when I began my career, it was mainly elderly priests who had control of the archives, and they were less open about welcoming scholars, particularly women scholars, I think. But this city has just been so welcoming and their documentation is so rich and so neglected that I've developed a book that I'm writing now basically in sort of. I view it as really a gift to the community that has been so welcoming to me. It's called A Piazza and its Bishops and the Commune in Medieval Citta di Castello. And it came out of actually a previous book I'd done, which was a shameless excuse to eat and drink my way through. Nearly every Italian town was on bishops palaces. And I never thought I would come back to this topic because I was pretty palaced out by the time I finished the book. But in Citta di Castello I found an example of. This is actually something I found when I was doing the palace's book. I found two cases of a commune stealing part or all of its bishop's palace. That was in Treviso and Pavia. But in those two cases, there was no subsequent documentation that could tell me anything about what happened afterwards. But in citta di Castello, 1225, the commune violently takes over the bishop's old palace. He had actually built a new palace. And then there's a century of litigation over the building, various other property. And so I decided to focus on this kind of story of the theft of the palace and this contention between the sea. But the way that it molds this, I think, most beautiful corner of this tiny Umbrian town in that. There's only two piazzas in this town. And one of them, the Piazza di Sopra, the upper piazza, is huge, very regular, was really very Renaissance. It's so regular, it feels a little fascist to me. Whereas the Piazza di Soto is the one with the cathedral, the bishop's palace, the communal palace, which was built on the site of the old bishop's palace that they'd stolen, is. Is extremely irregular. It's sort of weirdly triangular. It's got a beautiful park at the edge of it. It's really a center of lovely kind of urban life. There's great cafes, there's, you know, all sorts of people hanging out and chatting. It's a much more sociable space, but it really does come out of. It's really formed through the sort of struggle over power between a bishop, bishop, the bishops, who, as I explained before, in the sort of lack of other forces in the early Middle Ages, came to be the only public authorities in town. The commune basic collaborates with the bishop. The first evidence of our commune is actually the people asking their bishop to appeal to the Pope for help. Papal protection for them. And yeah, it's been really a lot of fun. I've still got a ways to go on this book, but it's also been a lot of fun for me to try to write in a more popular register, because I really want this book to be for the people of the city in gratitude for their wonderful openness and hospitality and to hopefully interest them. I'm using it also to toss it topics. We need research done because I'm usually alone in their archives. And we could really use a social history of the commune and the documentations there. We could really use a history of the cathedral canons. So I'm hoping maybe to spur some local interest in the great past that they have sitting right there in their archives.
- [57:44]
C
Guys.
- [57:44]
A
So that's what I'm up to.
- [57:47]
B
Well, both of your projects sound really interesting, and hopefully in the near future, we'll have both of you back on the New Books Network with other new books. So thank you both very much for your time. It's been great talking to you both.
- [58:06]
C
Thank you. Thank you so much for having us, Sam.