CHAPTER FIVE

THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF PREACHING:

Corrie E. Norman (Converse College)

Perugia, 1448: Everyone was crying and shouting for about half an hour, ':Jesus, have mercy!" Venice, ca. 1525: Everyone who went ... experienced a miracle .... , ca. 1576: And to heare the maner of the Italian preacher, with what a spirit he toucheth the hart, and moveth to compunc­ tion .... These things are handled with such a grace coming from the preachers mouth, that it calleth of al sortes great mulititudes, and worketh in their hartes marvelous effectes. 1

Crying and shouting, the miraculous, marvelous effects-these are typical descriptions of preaching that come down to us from the three centuries between 1400 and 1700 in Italy. In these years, preaching was at the center of Italian culture and devotion. People, at least in the major urban areas, expected that they and their soci­ ety would be dazzled, entertained, informed, even transformed, on a regular basis, by preaching. Thus they would come, sometimes in the tens of thousands if the sources do not exaggerate, to hear the Italian preachers. Denys Hay has observed the "pre-eminence" of preaching in the fifteenth century when the Franciscan Bernardino of Siena (d. 1444) and Dominican Savonarola of Florence (d. 1495) held forth. Many others less familiar to modern historians, such as the subject of the Perugian diarist cited above, Franciscan Roberto

1 Diary of Graziani of Perugia on Roberto Caracciolo da Lecce in Roberto Rusconi, Predica;::,ione e vita religiosa nella societd (Torino: Einaudi, 1981 ), pp. 192-4. Giuseppe Musso, Vita de! Rev. Cornelio Musso (Venice: Giunti, 1586), p. 4, in Corrie E. Norman, Humanist Taste and Franciscan Values, Cornelio Musso and Catholic Preaching in Six­ teenth-Century Italy (: Peter Lang, 1998), p. 16. Gregory Martin, Roma Sancta (1581), ed. George Bruner Parks (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letterature, 1969), pp. 71- 2, quoted injohn W. O'Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1993), p. 97. 126 CORRIE E. NORMAN

Caracciolo da Lecce (d. 1495), were wowing Italian crowds as well. 2 As Frederick McGinness has documented, preaching in Rome even experienced a "brisk quickening in the era afterTrent."3 The great preachers of that time, whose names were known all over by contemporaries, such as Francesco Panigarola, O.F.M (d. 1594) and later Paolo Segneri, SJ. (1694), are all but unknown today. One could even say that Italian culture of the late medieval and early modern periods was a preaching culture in that preaching was one of the primary means of communication and acted as such on multiple levels. As the commentators put it, preaching involved "everyone"; it "calleth of al sortes great mulititudes." Preaching shaped the culture and individuals with its "marvelous effectes"; and the culture shaped it. As Robert Bonfil reminds, it is "an ex­ pression rooted in society's perception of its social identity."4 It is equally important to remember, however, that for medieval and early modern preachers and hearers, preaching was first and fore­ most an expression of the divine; sacred mystery was the root of its power to transform and define. If early modern Italy was a preaching culture, it was largely a home-grown one. Anne Thayer has observed that Italy exported much sermon literature but imported very little - especially not northern literature.5 It had no need to do so, given the volume and quality of its own resources. This is significant for two reasons. First, it presents scholars of Italy with an opportunity to study the devel­ opment of a form of cultural representation as "Italian" as the art of or the writing of Dante. Indeed, it was primarily as a form of that early modern preaching was stud­ ied, when studied at all, in previous eras. Second, for historians of preaching in other regions, Italian preaching stands as a largely unexplored basis for comparison. For those specifically interested

2 Denys Hay, The Church in lta{y in the Fifieenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 1977), p. 67, in Franco Mormando, The Preacher's Demons: Bernardino da Siena and the Social Underworld ofEar{y Renaissance lta{y (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 3. 3 Frederick]. McGinness, Right Thinking and Sacred Oratory in Counter-Reformation Rome (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 82. 4 Robert Bonfil, "Preaching as Mediation between Elite and Popular Cultures: The Case of Judah de! Bene," in David B. Ruderman, ed., Preachers of the Italian Ghetto (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 69. 5 Anne Thayer, "Sermon Collections: 1450-1520," Medieval Sermon StudiesNews!.etter (Spring 1998): 5 7-8.