Renaissance Religion

It is necessary to stress, however, the importance of the revision of the

scholarship that occurred in the early 1970s. Charles Trinkhauss work initiated
a spate of studies that have transformed the field over the last
40 years.13 Scholars have reexamined institutional and intellectual developments.
They have emphasized the points of intersection between religious
and secular authority (see chapter 6). Drawing on the cultural anthropological
approaches of mile Durkheim and Clifford Geertz, they have
explored the meaning of religious rites and rituals; how they, in Durkheims
phrase, created mental states that ordered Renaissance society.14 Scholars
have likewise investigated popular aspects of religion. They have traced
the experiences of women (see chapter 3) and of ordinary citizens below the
level of the elite. They have sought to move beyond traditional disciplinary
boundaries, treating religious developments as part of the basic social, cultural,
and economic fabric of society.
The result is that Renaissance religion has been raised, in the words of
Timothy Verdon, to an equal coefficient of the Renaissance. The transformation
has occurred, however, even if the precise line of demarcation with
the Middle Ages is not always clear.15 The term late medieval remains a
popular one for events prior to the sixteenth century. It lives on in studies of
the institutional crises and heresies of the fourteenth century and in studies,
such as Andre Vauchezs influential analysis of the social construction
of (late medieval) sainthood in the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries, that
take the long view of events.16 The Renaissance label is rarely applied to
developments in German lands, the epicenter of the Reformation, for which
medieval seems a more appropriate precursor. Renaissance has been
more comfortably applied to Italy and France, though not in a consistent
manner.
A distinctive feature of the recent scholarship on Renaissance religion has
been its emphasis on lay practices. Scholars have traced the ways in which
traditionally secular spaces became increasingly sacralized during the era.
They observe a Renaissance tendency toward the laicization of spirituality
and contrast this to the Middle Ages during which sacred spaces monasteries
and nunneries in particular were physically set apart from the rest of
society. The interpretation allows the Renaissance its own distinct religious
coloring while at the same time creating a more meaningful bridge to theReformation,
when the separation between lay and sacred space decreased
still further, with the elimination altogether of the cloister by reformers.17
Popular and Civic Religion
A form of religious expression that has received a great deal of attention
from Renaissance scholars has been confraternities. They were voluntary
associations at the intersection of institutional and popular religious practice.
Their basic function was to promote piety and solidarity among members
and prepare them for the afterlife. They existed in a variety of forms,
most typically as laudesi, who sang hymns and prayed, and disciplinati, who
purged and flagellated themselves. Their members represented a broad sector
of society, including men and women of varying social status. According
to one estimate, a third of all urban households in Italy belonged to confraternities
in the late sixteenth century. Clergy sometimes participated, but
confraternities were mostly lay associations, whose members pledged an
oath and remained in the world.18
Given their ubiquity and diversity, confraternities offer important insights

into everyday life during the Renaissance. They sponsored feasts and festivals,
staged plays and held public processions in honor of patron saints and
funerals for members who died. The confraternity of the Archangel Raphael
in Florence was composed of young boys, whose joint activities included
singing, playing cards, and billiards. As corporations, confraternities patronized
the arts, hiring musicians and artists for some of the most renowned
commissions of the Renaissance. They distributed charity to the poor and
functioned also as hospitals, especially during times of the plague. They
helped create networks that allowed members to cross social and economic
boundaries and make connections beyond their neighborhoods. In Italy,
confraternities played a leading role in public executions, acting as comforters
to prepare the condemned for the afterlife.19
As noted in chapter 6, confraternities also had important political functions.
The Venetian government relied on confraternities, the so-called
scuole, for loans in times of war and fiscal crises.20 The consolidation of
Medici rule in Florence in the sixteenth century included manipulation of
confraternities as part of a larger strategy aimed at extending authority
over the church. This was a general trend throughout Europe, where political
centralization involved closer control of the religious institutions. David
Peterson has traced points of convergence between the republican movement
in Florence in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and Conciliar
thought. He noted how both argued against one-man rule and in favor of
popular participation in government.21
The coincidence between politics and religion is particularly apparent in
public rituals. The pioneering studies of Edward Muir and Richard Trexler
in the 1980s for the cities of Venice and Florence respectively emphasize the
ways in which sacred and civic spaces coincided and how governments used
rituals to validate and display civic authority. Local officials undertook a
variety of activities, including processions honoring local saints, burials of
important citizens, celebrations of military victories, diplomatic missions
and the ascension to office of local politicians and rulers. In Venice, the election
of a doge was an elaborate ceremony, in which the new ruler was transported
to the sea in a gold-painted barge. He dropped a gold ring into the
water, symbolic of his union with it. As Christ was bridegroom and master
of the church, the Venetian doge was bridegroom of the sea. In Florence,
the Medici family inserted itself into the festival of the Magi, a popular procession
originally sponsored by local confraternities. After assuming de facto
control of Florence in 1434, Cosimo de Medici joined the Magi processions
and commissioned works of art relating to the theme. His participation
symbolically enforced his prince-like power.22
The examples highlight the civic use of religion in Renaissance society.
Rituals projected power, both inside the state and outside of it. There was
little distinction between secular and sacred images.
The confluence of secular and religious themes is evident also in the
popular preaching of the era.23 The tradition is viewed prima facie as at
odds with the Renaissance, as representative of a distinctly medieval trend
and reaction against the elite cultural and intellectual currents of the era.
But there was during the Renaissance a strong mystical and prophetic culture
that included living saints such as Catherine of Siena (13471380)
and Teresa of Avila (see chapter 3) and itinerant charismatic preachers
such as Bernardino of Siena (13801440) and the Girolamo Savonarola
(14521498).24

Scholars now treat the culture as a fundamental part of Renaissance

society, whose roots lay in the Middle Ages. Bernardino and Savonarola
were Franciscan and Dominican monks respectively and represented a
mendicant tradition of preaching that dated to the thirteenth century.
Medieval Franciscan and Dominican preachers drew large crowds and spoke
on issues relating to modesty, penance, peace, and charity. Bernardino and
Savonarola undertook the same themes. They railed against personal vanity
and worldliness, warning listeners to tend first to their souls. The stirring
sermons of Bernardino involved prophetic visions and culminated in bonfires
of vanities, as listeners, often women, placed false hair, teeth and other
symbols of worldliness into fires. Savonarolas oratory also involved prophetic
visions. He created in Florence a cadre of piagnoni or criers to keep
watch on the moral fiber of the populace.25
Savonarola has had a special place in discussions of the Renaissance. In
his nineteenth century biography, Pasquale Villari posited Savonarola as an
emblem of Renaissance spirit of individuality.26 More recent scholars treat
Savonarola in terms of his milieu, in particular as part of the Florentine
political tradition in which he participated. Savonarolas brief rule of the
city is seen not as an aberration, but as evidence of important connection
between religion and politics, which was not inconsistent with Florentine
republican ideology (see chapter 6).27
The tradition of Renaissance popular preaching gained its distinct aspect
from its connection to the crises of the era. Bernardino of Sienas career
took place against a backdrop of plague and warfare, which were important
themes in his sermons. The outbreak of the Black Death occasioned the socalled
Bianchi movement, made up of a cross section of society that traveled
throughout northern and central Italy in the summer of 1399 preaching
peace and the need to end feuds and civil strife. Ottavia Niccoli has argued
that prophetic popular preaching reached a peak in Italy during wars and
political crises stemming from the French invasion of 1494.28
The Bianchi sought peace and concord and, as Daniel Bornstein has
demonstrated, evoked generally positive responses from civic authorities.
Other groups were, however, less pacific. Samuel Cohn has cataloged a
wide array of contemporary popular movements that were often violent
and had as their goal political and social change.29 The Black Death gave
rise in German lands to the flagellants, whose calls for peace and penance
were coupled with the denunciation of Jews, whom they accused of causing
the plague. In Spain, the Black Death set off massacres and forced conversions
of Jews in 1391. The marranos, as the converts were pejoratively
known, were targets of sporadic violence and persecution throughout the
fifteenth century.30 Charges of ritual murder were levied against the
Jewish community in Trent in 1475 and found their way into work of
humanists and in popular sermons.31 Bernardino of Siena virulently condemned
Jews in his sermons. The end of the reconquista in Spain in 1492
brought the expulsion of Jews, who dispersed throughout Europe and to
the Ottoman Empire.32
Muslims, Amerindians, and Africans were likewise victims of stereotypes
and mistreatment. The culmination of the reconquista in 1492 brought the
political subjugation of the last Islamic outpost in Spain (Granada) and the
expulsion of Muslims along with Jews. The military threat of the Ottoman
empire meanwhile stoked fears about Islam. Humanists depicted Muslims as
savages, who threatened the survival of civilization and good letters.33

New World natives were also depicted as savages and were subjugated and
enslaved by their European conquerors (see chapter 2). As with Muslims,
humanists applied pejorative language and images to them drawn fromclassical antiquity.
Charges of cannibalism against Amerindian natives
led, as we saw in chapter 2, to a debate in Europe about the meaning of
humanity.
The discovery of the New World meanwhile stimulated trade in black
Africans from the sub-Sahara, who, like the American natives, were seen as
slaves by nature. Europeans associated black skin color with evil, which
trumped all prior social status and nationality.34 The Spanish sneezed when
black Africans passed by them, to ward off evil. Local stereotypes included
depiction of Africans as lazy, shiftless, and sexually promiscuous. The concept
of blackness was, however, a variable one. Italian financial records
suggest differences in price according to skin color: the lighter the skin, the
higher the price for a slave. Even among indigenous Europeans there appears
to have been distinction according to hue and color of skin.35
The Renaissance atmosphere of intolerance also involved repression of
heretics and witches. Witchcraft was, as we saw in chapter 3, perceived as
an international conspiracy and charges of demonic possession were most
typically leveled against women. Fears were heightened by religious fervor
arising from Protestant reform and Catholic counter-response. Local authorities
undertook extraordinary efforts to control heresy, creating tribunals
and inquisitorial commissions to root out disbelief and dissent. Carlo
Ginzburgs well-known sixteenth century miller Menocchio was a victim of
one such purge. Menocchios creative comparison of Gods creation of the
universe to the formation of cheese and worms (the latter representing
angels) brought condemnation by the inquisition at Friuli, where he was
burned alive at the stake.36
Repressive measures were also taken against vagrants, vagabonds, and
homosexuals, who were often fitted into the same category. The charge of
sodomy, a crime in Renaissance Europe, was leveled at heretics and witches.
In his sermons Bernardino of Siena equated Jews with witches, heretics,
and sodomites on the grounds that all were in league with the devil. The
portrait of intolerance includes a whole lexicon of national typologies.
Germans described the Poles as thieves and Hungarians as violent and
drunkards, who flapped their arms when inebriated.37
The portrait is not, however, without nuance. Black Africans gained
praise albeit as objects for their physical prowess and exotic qualities.
They functioned at the court of Catherine of Austria of Portugal as symbols
of royal power. Not all Africans were slaves. Some served as ambassadors,
others as musicians (drummers and trumpeters) at Renaissance courts; a
black confraternity was founded in Lisbon. Amerindians of the New World
were seen by contemporaries, such as Michel Montaigne, as noble and virtuous,
if in a primitive way. Despite fears of the Ottomans, there was significant
cultural and artistic interaction between the Muslim and Christian worlds. The Muslim
convert Al-Hassan Al-Wazzan was one of the most
popular writers of the early sixteenth century. And despite fierce repression,
there remained vibrant Jewish communities in Europe. The historian Ariel
Toaff has cataloged the presence of these in fourteenth and fifteenth century
Italy. Jews worked as doctors, blacksmiths, and innkeepers and played
an important role in Italian economic life.38 Jews participated in confraternities
in Venice. The seventeenth-century Venetian rabbi Leon Modena

wrote an autobiography that scholars have seen as reflecting the broad

Renaissance spirit of individualism. Even in Spain, after the forced conversions,
there remained important Jewish communities, such as at Morvedre,
which flourished economically in the fifteenth century. Robert Bonfil has
described Jewish life in Italy as neither wholly good nor bad, but as serving
as a mirror of Christianity, and providing a means by which Christians
defined themselves.39