The Preacher's Demons: Bernardino of Siena and the Social Underworld of Early Renaissance Italy / Edition 1

by Franco Mormando

Overview

"When the city was filled with these bonfires, he then combed the city, and whenever he received notice of some public sodomite, he had him immediately seized and thrown into the nearest bonfire at hand and had him burned immediately." This story, of an anonymous individual who sought to cleanse medieval Paris, was part of a sermon delivered in Siena, Italy, in 1427. The speaker, the friar Bernardino (1380-1444), was one of the most important public figures of the time, and he spent forty years combing the towns of Italy, instructing, admonishing, and entertaining the crowds that gathered in prodigious numbers to hear his sermons.

His story of the Parisian vigilante was a recommendation. Sexual deviants were the objects of relentless, unconditional persecution in Bernardino's sermons. Other targets of the preacher's venom were witches, Jews, and heretics. Mormando takes us into the social underworld of early Renaissance Italy to discover how one enormously influential figure helped to dramatically increase fear, hatred, and intolerance for those on society's margins.

This book is the first on Bernardino to appear in thirty-five years, and the first ever to consider the preacher's inflammatory role in Renaissance social issues.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226538549
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	05/01/1999
Edition description:	1
Pages:	380
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d)

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
CHAPTER ONE
"The Voice Most Eagerly Listened To":
The Public Career and Critical Fortune of Bernardino of Siena
1. Popular Preaching in Early-Fifteenth-Century Italian Society
2. The Medieval Popular Franciscan Sermon
3. The Audience and the Setting: The Making of a Preacher-Celebrity
4. Bernardino and the History of the "Persecuting Society"
5. The Witch, the Sodomite, the Jew, and Bernardino
CHAPTER TWO
"Let's Send up to the Lord God Some of the Same Incense":
Preparing the Great Witch Conflagration
1. Bernardino and the Witches of Rome, 1426
2. The Witch of Todi, Matteuccia Di Francesco
3. The Godmother of Lucca
4. The Demonization of the Heretic
5. The Power and Omnipresence of the Devil
6. Bernardino's Guide to Sorcery, Superstition, and Folk Medicine
7. The Destruction of the Pagan Well, "Fontetecta"
8. Popular Piety and Christian "White Magic"
9. Seek and Destroy: The Response to Bernardino
CHAPTER THREE
"Even the Devil Flees in Horror at the Sight of This Sin":
Sodomy and Sodomites
1. Definitions and Distinctions
2. Sodomy as the "Worst Crime"
3. Scriptures, Science, and Reason against Sodomy
4. The Causes of the Sodomitic Vice
5. Adolescent Sexuality and Sodomy
6. Bernardino and Vincenzo, a Particular Friendship
7. The Cure: Terror, Shame, and Destruction
8. The Response of the Towns
CHAPTER FOUR
"All Jew Are the Chief Enemies of All Christians . . . If You See a Jew in Need, You Must Help Him with an Authentic, Just, Holy, and Active Love":
Reappraising Bernardino's Anti-Semitism
1. Jews and Judaism in Bernardino's Opera Omnia
2. Padua 1423: Repromulgating Canon Law
3. The So-called Testamento di San Bernardino
4. The Campaign against Usury
5. The Passion Sermons
6. Miscellaneous Teachings of Judaism
7. The Effect of Bernardino's Preaching Campaign
8. Assessing the Evidence
CONCLUSION
"I Heard the Sound of You in the Garden, and I Was Afraid"
Appendix 1: The Date of Roman Witch Trial and of Bernardino's Heresy Trail
Appendix 2: The Jewish Prohibition List, Padua 1423
Notes
Works Cited
Index

What People are Saying About This

James A. Brundage

Sermons from the distant past, however compelling they may have been to the audiences to whom they were first addressed, seldom make gripping reading for later generations. The sermons of St. Bernardino of Siena are and exception. A ferocious and formidable rabblerouser in his own day, hios spirited attacks on the threats that he believed menace fifteenth-century Christendom still make gripping reading.
— Author of Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe

Editorial Reviews

Mormando's (Italian/Boston Coll.) survey of the 40-year preaching career of the Franciscan friar and Catholic saint Bernardino of Siena (1380–1444) is one of only a few book-length studies on this mouthpiece of medieval obscurantism. This book further dismantles the view of the early Italian Renaissance as an enlightened period, exposing the fundamental fears and insecurities of the Quattrocento (feminine magical power, paganism, the body and sexuality, and Christianity's inherent limitations) through the prism of Bernardino's sermons dealing with witchcraft, sodomites, and Jews. The friar's passionate call to denounce witches and burn them at the stake rests upon folklore beliefs that attribute to witches a number of grave sins, including infanticide, blood-sucking, and even fornication with the Devil. Bernardino was just as adamant about eradicating sodomy, by which he understood any sexual activity not leading to procreation. Passing on to Bernardino's third scapegoat, the Jews, Mormando runs into a problem. While he seeks to downplay somewhat the saint's notorious anti-Semitism, he advances unconvincing evidence. Indeed, the friar emerges here as a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semite, who repeatedly referred to the Jews as the chief enemies of Christianity and proscribed any social or business contact between them and his followers. He also spoke in favor of isolating the Jews and ordering them to wear distinguishing badges. As for Bernardino's occasional adjurations to "love the Jew with a general love," this was no more than lip service to an abstract principle of brotherly love and cannot attenuate his responsibility for spreading hostility toward Jews. Unfortunately, Mormando paints hispicture of the Quattrocento exclusively though this preacher's eyes, without presenting the popular reaction to his message. Contrary to the book's professed goal, we learn more about the anxieties of Bernardino's tormented psyche and the intolerant streak in Catholicism than about the social underworld of early Renaissance Italy. .

Kirkus Reviews