Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School Saint Bernardino and Observing Lay Reform Noah Cole Follow this and additional works at the DigiNole: FSU's Digital Repository. For more information, please contact lib-ir@fsu.edu FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES SAINT BERNARDINO AND OBSERVING LAY REFORM By NOAH COLE A Thesis submitted to the Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts 2021 Noah Cole defended this thesis on March 19, 2021. The members of the supervisory committee were: James A. Palmer Professor Directing Thesis Ben Dodds Committee Member Maximilian Scholz Committee Member The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the thesis has been approved in accordance with university requirements.
ii This thesis is dedicated to anyone who has ever tried to improve. May we continue to be charitable to ourselves and others. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This thesis could not have been completed, like any sustained project, without the help of innumerable people. First, I would like to thank my cohort.
Writing history is not easy, and it is certainly made more difficult during a pandemic. Members of my cohort spent countless hours listening to me howl into the wind about some aspect of this thesis that was not working out. For that alone, they deserve thanks. I must especially thank Lee Morrison.
He has been a source of great inspiration, friendship, and support. I need to thank Eva Carrara of the FSU Classics department too. Not only was she an incredible Latin teacher all those years ago, but every time I turned down a translation dead-end, she was there to help me figure out what the problem was. She was always patient, interested, and helpful.
Eva, thank you so much. I must also thank the history department at FSU. Most notably though, I thank the three members of my committee. During this project, I had a habit of popping out of nowhere with a 40-page draft.
Time and again, in whatever form I arrived, James Palmer, Benjamin Dodds, and Maximillian Scholz were ready and willing to help me. Also, I need to thank George Williamson. He does not realize it, but that one off-hand email conversation he had with me was critical for any success this thesis contains. Lastly, although Cathy McClive did not help directly with this project, she did get me, of all people, to begin thinking outside the confines of intellectual history.
That, I can assure you, is a difficult thing to do. I also send thanks to my parents. Sending me off to FSU after my stint in community college seemed like a no-brainer to them. Little did they know that I would end up applying to graduate school and throwing myself into academic pursuits.
They have endured with unending patience calls that I missed, late responses, and far fewer visits home than I think any of us expected. Lastly, and probably most importantly: thank you Sarah. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract. vi CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION .1 CHAPTER 2: SERMO VII: ON ALMSGIVING .29 CHAPTER 3: SERMO XLIV: THE VAIN WORLD OF FLESH .65 CHAPTER 4: SERMO XXVII: THE TWELVE ERRORS AND NO WORLD FOR TOMORROW .86 CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION: BERNARDINO’S OBSERVANT REFORM .134 v ABSTRACT Saint Bernardino exerted profound influences on lay piety and both the image and trajectory of the Observant movement.
While there have been numerous studies on Bernardino the preacher and the Observant movement as a whole, no study has shown how preaching to the laity could have spread the ideas and values of the Observance. This study seeks to illuminate the ways in which Bernardino’s Latin sermons, which were model sermons for preachers, contain deep Observant parallels. While the Observant movement has been appreciated for the widespread reform it brought to the religious orders, few have shown how this reform effort might have been transported to the laity. By looking at three of Bernardino’s sermons designed for use by preachers, I argue we can read many Observant beliefs and anxieties underlying Bernardino’s thought.
This allows us to sketch a picture of how the laity might have absorbed Observant ideologies unintentionally and how preachers might have directly transported the Observance to the laity. Additionally, this study challenges our definitions of the Observance, where we can find it, and who had stakes in its success or failure. vi CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION In 1400, a plague ravaged Siena. While many of the rich left the town to escape the plague, the dedicated stayed behind to tend to the sick and dying.
Bernardino was one of those dedicated souls. Having only just begun his life of seclusion, he felt forced by circumstance to venture back into the world. Soon after he began assisting the sick, he himself became stricken with plague. Suspended between death and life, he had a dream.
He saw himself in some great uncultivated field, in the midst of which was a lofty tower, and in the tower, a window. Through the window great flames were issuing forth, and in the midst of the flames, a woman [appeared], with her hair all unbound and her arms raised up and apart, who shouted three times “Francis.”1 With this dream Bernardino finally decided to join the Observant Franciscans. In a dramatic shift from his previous desire to live a secluded life, Bernardino launched himself into the world on a mission of reforming every Christian (and heretic!) soul he could find. It is this goal of reform that this thesis turns to.
Bernardino, born in 1380, worked tirelessly for reform, preaching to the laity for hours on end. In time, he became one of the most famous Observant Franciscans in his own day. The Observants were reformers within the various monastic orders who wished to return to a more apostolic and true form of religious life. Seeking to emulate their legendary founders, like St.
Francis, in Bernardino’s case, they abandoned all property, took great pains to follow the constitutions of their order, and renewed their vows. More will be said below about the movement, its setbacks and eventual triumph, but suffice it so say that during Bernardino’s life Italy and beyond was awash with dialogues and disputes about 1 Both this quote and general sketch come from Franco Mormando, The Preacher’s Demons: Bernardino of Siena and the Social Underworld of Early Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Bernardino’s dream from Maffeo Vegio, “Vita sancti Bernardini Senensis. Maii tomus V, die vigesima.
Quoted in Mormando, 35. As Bernardino walked barefoot and gaunt to the next town he was going to preach at, he might have thought about the recently concluded Council of Constance, the end of the Great Schism, or maybe (depending on when) his trial for heresy investigated by none other than Pope Martin V himself.2 Perhaps with a satisfied shrug he recalled how Martin had exonerated him of all charges of heresy and had become a great supporter. He might have then thought of how much work he still had to do, such as the continued contempt many of the laity felt for the professional poor and the church in general. He might have thought of his own experience: once while asking for alms in a city, a woman had thrown a stale loaf of bread from a window, striking Bernardino and hurting him badly.3 Or, he might have thought about how despite his best efforts at gender balance, women overwhelmingly attended his sermons.4 That Bernardino’s success, frustrations, and overall reception was influenced by his status as an Observant is uniformly appreciated.
However, no study has attempted to actually show the intersection between Bernardino the Observant and Bernardino the preacher. The historiography of preaching is focused most especially on preachers and their interactions with lay people. The historiography of the Observance, for its part, focuses on the reform of the orders, of which lay people play a very small role, if one at all. Studies on Bernardino follow this divide.
Studies that chronicle his preaching activities note that he is an Observant, but they do not qualify how his preaching in particular might have reflected his Observant background. Did the laity know about the Observance, and if so, did they care? Can we say anything about Bernardino’s preaching to the laity since he was an Observant? Is there a difference between an 2 See Iris Origo, The World Of San Bernardino (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962). 4 See Cynthia Polecritti, Preaching Peace in Renaissance Italy: Bernardino of Siena & His Audience (Washington, D.C: Catholic University of America Press, 2000). 2 Observant preaching to the laity versus an unreformed Conventual? These questions, left unanswered, mean that we have a history of preaching where the importance of the Observance is accepted, but unexplained, and a history of the Observance where the movement’s influence on society is taken for granted, but remains unexplored.
This thesis attempts to begin answering some of these questions. In particular, by looking at Bernardino’s Latin sermons. His Latin sermons were written for clerical eyes only, meant to help training Franciscan preachers.5 They consist of preachable topics that could be used to rapidly create a vernacular sermon for lay audiences. I aim to show that they are rife with Observant character and analogues, despite having nothing to do with the reform of the orders.
Using three of his sermons, I argue that we can find deep Observant parallels in them such as a focus on exterior action to prove interior spirituality, Observant virtues such as discipline, simplicity, and purity, and Observant anxieties such as a concern with worldly attachment, decline, laxity, and spiritual error. These Observant characteristics should cause us to consider his sermons Observant ones, even though they were meant for the laity. Thinking of them this way allows us to see possible intersections between Observant reform and lay reform. Additionally, it will allow us to begin thinking about the direct ways in which the Observant reform ideology, which was created to reform the religious orders, was brought to bear on lay reform.
Bernardino’s Latin sermons were created for the training of and use by young Franciscans. As such, they represent a stable form of his thought with which to investigate his vision of reform for lay society. Additionally, that they were written by him makes them unique. Most studies on Bernardino focus on his vernacular sermons, which were recorded by listeners, 5 Mormando, The Preacher’s Demons, 41.
They vary wildly in preservation, content, and style. These reportationes make up the bulk of source materials with which scholars have made claims about Bernardino. His Latin sermons, by contrast, have not been appreciated in their full uniqueness, either being used to buttress claims made with his vernacular sermons, or they have been used in histories less focused on lay reform.6 Almost every major study on Bernardino in English has focused on his vernacular sermons. They largely argue for his ability as a preacher, the ways in which he tried to persuade the laity, and the efforts he made to move people to action.
These investigations into his ability and role as a preacher in society coheres with the general posture of the larger discipline of sermon studies. Most of the work within the past few decades in the field as a whole has focused almost exclusively on sermons given in the vernacular.7 Vernacular sermons present a window through which historians can see the educational programs of preachers, along with their assumptions of what they felt their audience would be willing to listen to.8 Additionally, most extant vernacular sermons were not written by the preachers themselves, but by individuals attending the sermons in question. These recordings were ad hoc and vary in character, relative accuracy, and the language they were recorded in.9 Bernardino is especially valuable in this 6 This dynamic will be discussed below.