"Che sono queste novita?": Le religiones novae in Italia meridionale (secoli XIII e XIV) (review)

Abstract

Che sono queste novita? Le religiones novae in Italia meridionale (secoli XIII e XIV). By Luigi Pellegrini. [Mezzogiorno medievale e moderno, 1.] (Naples: Liguori Editore. 2000. Pp.x, 403. euro19,63 paperback.) This volume is a collection of studies, many previously published in conference proceedings and local history journals, of the penetration of the mendicant orders into southern Italy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. As in Luigi Pellegrini's earlier work (especially his innovative Insediamenti francescani nell'Italia del Duecento, 1984), there is a strong focus throughout the book on the geography of settlement and on the socio-economic forces that influenced the various orders' choices of location. The book begins with two introductory essays, providing first an overview of the beginnings of the mendicant movement and its relationship to lay piety and the larger spiritual currents of the day. The second essay examines the degree to which the tense relations between Frederick II and Gregory IX influenced the friars' opportunities to settle in the south. Pellegrini concludes that the creation of new communities was indeed slowed during periods of papal/imperial hostility, but that the less dynamic demographic and economic situation of the southern cities was an equally important factor in making the mendicant life relatively rare before the 1230's. Pellegrini is careful to distinguish among the needs of the different orders, emphasizing, for example, that socio-economic issues affected the Dominicans more acutely than the Franciscans because of the preference of the former group for larger cities with universities; the Franciscans settled readily in small towns and consequently found the south more congenial. In the following section, three chapters on various regions in southern Italy (Terra di Lavoro, Sicily, Capitanata) allow Pellegrini to examine in detail what we can know of the chronology and geography of the initial settlement of the various mendicant groups, while two additional chapters explore the experience of the Franciscans and the Augustinians, respectively, in specific localities. These chapters, although (or because) they are detailed local studies, are the real heart of the book, exploring the mutually reinforcing ways in which mendicant settlement and virban and demographic development can be studied. Pellegrini emphasizes the degree to which the orders operated independently of existing ecclesiastical jurisdictions, gravitating instead toward 'nodes' or centers of demographic and economic activity like the coastal city of Foggia, for example, or even the routes of transhumance in the Abruzzo. …