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Medieval London Collected Papers of Caroline M Medieval London Collected Papers of Caroline M. Barron RESEARCH IN MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN CULTURE Medieval Institute Publications is a program of The Medieval Institute, College of Arts and Sciences Medieval London Collected Papers of Caroline M. Barron Edited by Martha Carlin and Joel T. Rosenthal Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture MEDIEVAL INSTITUTE PUBLICATIONS Western Michigan University Kalamazoo Copyright © 2017 by the Board of Trustees of Western Michigan University Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Barron, Caroline M., author. | Carlin, Martha, editor. | Rosenthal, Joel Thomas, 1934- editor. Title: Medieval London : collected papers of Caroline M. Barron / edited by Martha Carlin and Joel T. Rosenthal. Description: Kalamazoo : Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016052644 (print) | LCCN 2016059915 (ebook) | ISBN 9781580442565 (paperbound : alkaline paper) | ISBN 9781580442572 Subjects: LCSH: London (England)--History--To 1500. | City and town life--England--London--History--To 1500. | London (England)--Social life and customs. | London (England)--Social conditions. Classification: LCC DA680 .B364 2017 (print) | LCC DA680 (ebook) | DDC 942.1/203--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016052644 ISBN: 9781580442565 eISBN: 9781580442572 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (elec- tronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Chapter 8 The Travelling Saint: Zita of Lucca and England NLIKE SEVERAL OF THE English saints whose visibility has Ubeen discreetly reduced in the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, St Zita of Lucca was a real and verifiable person. Born at Monsagrati in the hills north of Lucca in about 1218 she early displayed signs of distinctive piety.1 At the age of twelve she moved into the town of Lucca to take up work as a servant/housekeeper of the wealthy Faitinelli family who lived in a house (which is still standing) near the church of San Frediano. Here her sanctity developed: she carried out acts of practi- cal charity, helping pilgrims, the destitute and those condemned to death. Among her daily tasks she found time for prayer and for fasting. Zita was probably not an ideal servant for she prayed as she worked and this some- times led to ‘sub-standard’ housework.2 She avoided amorous relationships with her fellow servants (or anyone for that matter) and remained a virgin all her life.3 A scientific examination of her mummified remains suggests that she experienced severe malnutrition in her childhood and tuberculo- sis after her arrival in Lucca. Her work in the kitchen left a legacy of carbon deposits in her lungs.4 But, in spite of this, she regularly attended her local church of San Frediano (a house of regular canons) and was accustomed there to pray before a painting of the crucified Christ flanked by the Virgin and St John which is still to be seen in the church. Her employers, having at first been unenthusiastic about her religious fervor, in the end promoted Zita’s activities and allowed her the freedom to travel to various holy sites in the region.5 There is evidence also that her diet improved in her later years: perhaps as her employers came to value the ancilla dei in their household.6 When Zita died on 27 April 1278 the Faitinelli family paid for her funeral and large crowds gathered attempting to secure relics. Almost at once miracles began to occur at her tomb and in 1278 these were gath- ered together and recorded by a notary of the Faitinelli family, ‘Faytinellus Melioris’.7 In 1321 the family built a chapel at the church of San Frediano and had an altar dedicated there to ‘saint’ Zita. In the 1370s, a century after Chapter 8 194 Zita’s death, the family, in anticipation of the hoped-for translation of the saint’s relics, embellished the chapel yet further and provided a new altar and reliquary. Conveniently, perhaps, some new miracles were recorded in 1380. And while the family pressed for confirmation of the cult of the ‘saint’ they developed the chapel as their own family mausoleum, erect- ing an expensive marble balustrade in 1412.8 This appropriation of the chapel as a private mausoleum caused some friction with the canons of San Frediano, but a compromise was finally reached whereby the family could choose the ‘rector’ of the chapel, but he had to be one of the canons of the church.9 Finally in 1519 Pope Leo X sent a bull to Antonio Faitinelli in which he authorised the celebration of the feast of Beata Zita in the church of San Frediano on 27 April as a ‘major double’.10 In this way, Zita’s sanctity, strongly attested and recognised locally, was confirmed at Rome, although she was not formally canonized until 1696. It was then accepted that she had been popularly recognised as a saint for many years and her name was finally added to the Roman Martyrology in 1748. So, by the end of the seventeenth century her cult in Lucca (and elsewhere) had been flourishing for 400 years. Remarkably, for 200 of those years, between the mid fourteenth and the mid sixteenth centuries, her cult had developed strongly in England, where there seems to have been more enthusiasm for Zita than anywhere else in Europe apart from Lucca itself. This is a sur- prising phenomenon and worthy of some examination. Several historians have studied the movement of pilgrims and intercessors over long dis- tances to visit the shrines of venerated and miracle-working saints.11 The survival of pilgrim badges far from their place of origin also bears witness to the movement of pilgrims across Europe.12 But what we have in the case of St Zita is not the movement of pilgrims, nor the movement of relics, but the movement of the cult itself. While the body of the saint remained securely in the church of St Frediano in Lucca and attracted a modest local following, the cult of the saint leaped across the Alps, and the French and German lands, and settled firmly in England. How and why did Zita’s cult only reach England, and why was it so popular? It should be said that domestic saints like Zita, although common in Italy and, to a lesser extent, in other parts of Europe, were not much in evidence in England where saints, after the Norman conquest, seem to been drawn very much form the upper ranks of society: Edward the Confessor, Thomas Becket, Simon de Montfort, Thomas of Lancaster, Edward II, and Henry VI.13 The English popular cults seem to have made saints out of political figures (usually failures) or clerics, rather than ser- THE Travelling Saint 195 vants, let alone women servants. But in Europe the female household saint was common and the role of such saints has been helpfully studied by Michael Goodich.14 In northern Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth cen- turies there were Notburga of Rottenburg and Margaret of Louvain, but there are many more to be found in Italy. Apart from Zita herself, there was Margaret of Città di Castello, Sibillina Biscossi of Pavia, Veridiana Attavanti of Castelfiorentino, Oringa of Santa Croce sull’Arno and Jane of Orvieto. Goodich points out some common features of the lives and cults of these servant-saints: the role played by the servants’ employers in pro- moting the cult, often for their own political reasons; the popular enthusi- asm which followed the death of the saint; the attention paid to the post- mortem miracles which show the ‘rural, female constituency of the servant saint’; and the appearance of some opposition to the cult, perhaps fostered by those opposed politically to the employers of the servant saint.15 So Zita’s style of sanctity was not uncommon in thirteenth-century Italy, which may explain why her cult did not develop far outside her own city since every city had a servant saint of its own. But the promotion of cults within Italian city states depended upon the patronage of a particu- lar local family and also upon the civic politics of the time. The apparent revival of interest by the Faitinelli family in the cult of ‘their’ servant saint in the last quarter of the fourteenth century coincides with a period in which they were active in the political life of Lucca, having been in exile in Venice while Lucca fell under the influence of Pisa.16 So Zita was use- ful to the Faitinelli family. She may also have been useful to the canons of San Frediano for it must have been advantageous to them to have a saint of their own who could begin to challenge the long-established cult (on which more below) of the Volta Santa in the cathedral of St Martin in Lucca. From the early fourteenth century Zita’s cult was recognised by the city commune. The city statutes as early as 1308 called for a guard to be placed around the church of San Frediano on the vigil of her feast. By the middle of the century the civic accounts record official payments made at her shrine during her festival, and it would seem that her feast was recog- nised as a public holiday in Lucca.17 Indeed Zita’s identification with her native city was so complete that Dante in The Inferno could identify a man from Lucca simply as ‘an elder of Santa Zita’.18 But the evidence for the existence of the cult elsewhere in Italy is very slim.
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