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

Franco Mormando, The Preacher's Demons: Bernardino of Siena and the Social Underworld of Early Renaissance Italy

Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999. xvi + 5 pls. + 380 pp. $29. ISBN: 0-226-53854-0.

Cynthia L. Polecritti, Preaching Peace in Renaissance Italy: Bernardino of Siena and His Audience

Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2000. xiv + 3 pls. + 271 pp. $61.95. ISBN: 0-8132-0960-9.

On one of several occasions when he denounced those "universal" sins (the number varying on different occasions) for "which God frequently judges and punishes states and kingdoms" (Mormando, 52-53), Bernardino of Siena listed four in particular: witchcraft, sodomy, usury, and political factionalism. Mormando's study deals with the first three of these, Polecritti's with the fourth. Both books greatly enlarge our knowledge of Bernardino, the late-medieval and early Renaissance urban sermon, and their audiences. The subject of sins which call down the wrath of God upon entire communities greatly preoccupied a number of European minds between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries, especially when they were considered in an apocalyptic context, as they certainly were in Bernardino's case. The great preacher's attention to these sins as considered in the two studies under review here, taken as a crucial ensemble of social and theological anxieties, tells us much about the devotional and moral climate of ea rly-fifteenth-century northern and central Italy.

The demons of Mormando's title are the problems of witchcraft/sorcery, "sodomy," and Judaism/usury upon which Bernardino expounded in his sermons at great length and with mixed results on a number of occasions. Although the preacher's attitude toward Jews has long been known and widely discussed (not, as Mormando points out, always very accurately), his concerns with witchcraft and various forms of sexual activity that fell under the heading of "sodomy" have received far less attention. Mormando's exhaustive and intelligent study of the three in combination gives a far better-rounded picture of the dark side of the preacher's concerns about those sins that to him (and others) particularly threatened to bring down the wrath of God on entire societies.

Mormando's and Polecritti's choice of subjects contributes to the growing literature on Bernardino and preaching, particularly complementing Bernadette Paton's recent Preaching Friars and the Civic Ethos: Siena, 1380-1480 (1992), and to the recent scholarly interest in the problems of sorcery, sexuality, and political and religious difference -- particularly anti-Judaism -- in the early fifteenth century in Italy and elsewhere.

The Preacher's Demons is neither a biography nor an introduction to Bernardino's thought. Mormando begins with an efficient and thorough introduction to the late-medieval Franciscan sermon and its preachers and audiences, moving through a brief account of Bernardino's life, preaching career, and posthumous reputation, and a discussion of the sources, including the wonderfully meticulous amateur scribe Benedetto di maestro Bartolomeo (43-44). He then locates his own study in the context of the best-known recent work in social and cultural history of the period before devoting his three last chapters to the witch, the sodomite, and the Jew/usurer in Bernardino's thought and texts. Two appendices consider particular points of scholarship properly hors de texte, the bibliography is exhaustive, and the notes are extensive and generous with both original and secondary citations.

Mormando is aware that each of his three bernardine themes has a distinctive historiography of its own, and he locates the Bernardine treatments of each very precisely in current scholarship, including sermon-scholarship. Bernardino's concerns with witchcraft/sorcery initially met considerable local indifference, and his descriptions of witches' activities are not yet those of the full-blown witch of the later fifteenth century, although he does concentrate on female witches and discusses their assemblies, which were not yet quite sabbats, but tregende, echoing a term of Jacopo Passavanti a century earlier. He is an early representative of the charge that witchcraft is a form of idolatry and therefore of heresy, and he insisted that witches should be burned. And in a few instances Bernardino was able to turn that initial indifference into belief, then fear and occasionally action on the part of his audiences.

Bernardino's fears concerning sodomy (variously circumlocuted, but usually in the form of male pedophlia and ephebophilia, although Polecritti expands this to include marital sodomy) encountered less indifference. Like witchcraft it was considered a form of idolatry, but unlike witchcraft, it was more consistently feared and detested and could be readily detected and tried, as the research of William Bowsky and Michael Rocke has shown.

If witchcraft and sodomy are new contributions to the study of Bernardino, Mormando's discussion of anti-Judaism and usury are distinctly revisionist, taking on even the work of Diane Hughes and Roberto Bonfil, which he argues is based on inadequate familiarity with the full range and character of the preacher's work: "Despite Bernardino's long-standing and widespread reputation as persistent persecutor of the Jews, the fact is that the friar devotes little time to the specific topic of the Jews per se in his preaching and in his writing" (169). Conventionally anti-Semitic Bernardino certainly was, but his real target was usury -- the great offense against charity and fraternity -- about which he spoke at great length, not primarily Jews, about whom he spoke little, and what he said was generally conventional.

Although Bernardino knew and was discussed admiringly by a number of humanists, his sermon content and the "everyday world, interior and exterior, of the masses of citizenry was conducted pretty much along the lines that had been long drawn in the medieval past" (Mormando, 233). Early Renaissance piety was no less pious because it was largely traditional, and no less fearful because it was at least partly humanist.

Nor was fifteenth-century northern Italian society less factional because of either. Polecritti's subtitle, "Bernardino of Siena and His Audience," is particularly apt when the problem of local peace and discord is considered. Witchcraft, sodomy, and usury were the sins of a few in the audience, but discord and hatred, feud and faction, touched far more, perhaps most. In her first chapter Polecritti rightly deals extensively (39-83) with Bernardino's audience and the setting of the sermons. Here she offers a broader and more analytical characterization of the sermon-audience than Mormando, although she has also benefited greatly from his work. Her attention to the expected roles and functions of gender and to the structures of fifteenth-century Italian urban society greatly enriches our understanding of the kinds of sermons Bernardino and others preached as well as the preachers' understanding of their own audiences and what those audiences expected and heard.

In her second chapter, Polecritti examines the fabric of social discord, considering the procedural instruments of formal dispute-settlement, and citing and using most of the relevant historical and anthropological scholarship to great advantage. The status of peacemakers had always been uncertain: their eloquence might fail, their novelty wear off, their welcome wear out for having too greatly disturbed the top of the social hierarchy, or they might be suspected of partisanship. Polecritti is persuasive in explaining the success of the Observant Franciscans in this difficult role: "Their renewal of Francis's ascetic spirit helped them to be 'outside' secular society, but their astute adaptation of that spirit gave them special advantages within the consolidated political world of the fifteenth century" (101).

Her third chapter, "The Poisoned Word," describes Bernardino's own astute adaptation of the Observantine spirit. His careful condemnation was not specifically of particular families, societies, or parties, but rather of general parzialita and its consequent theological, moral and social evils; of detrazione (the poisoned word of the chapter's title) and its malevolent effects. The YHS emblem replaced the insignia and banners of faction.

The final chapter is a close and astute analysis of the political circumstances of Bernardino's August to early October sermon cycle in Siena in 1427. Throughout the book Polecritti's great sensitivity to both preacher and audience greatly illuminates the social and cultural context of Bernardino's sermons, and she writes very eloquently and effectively.

Bernardino also knew that his sermons might have only a short-term effect and that many in his audiences would probably backslide, but he also urged his hearers to think of themselves as the buon cavalcatore who often falls from his horse as he learns to ride. God waits patiently and offers the sinner yet another chance -- at least in the case of discord. For the preacher's demons of Mormando's study, particularly the witches and sodomites and unrepentant usurers, however, there seems to be less hope. For them there is only the grim prospect of the preacher's furious denunciation, the threat of public shame and punishment, followed by an eternity in the casa calda.