A New World in a Small Place: Church and Religion in the Diocese of Rieti, 1188-1378 By Robert Brentano (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 429 reach ofmost students. The book is preceded by a briefbut lucid introduction by Katherine Christensen, which, again, will be of help to students. No translation, of course, will ever capture all the complexities of the original, particularly an original that is composed of extracts from works of greatly varying purposes and times, harmonized by a twelfth-century author, and then taken apart and recombined by others from that time forward. As is the case with all translations that are used with students, the teacher must be prepared to say, for example, that the word translated as "usages" in the famous first sentence of the work (moribus), also means "customs" and, in some contexts, though probably not this one, "morals." One must also point out that important as the first twenty distinctions ofthe work are, they operate at a level of generality higher than that of most of the rest of the work. A very different, and in some ways more competent, Gratian is at work in Causa 1 (on simony) and in Causae 27-35 (on marriage). One can only hope that Professors Thompson and Gordley do not stop here, but go on to provide us with at least some samples from the rest of the work. Charles Donahue, Jr. Harvard Law School A New World in a Small Place: Church and Religion in the Diocese ofRieti, 1188—1378. By Robert Brentano. With an appendix on the frescoes in the choir of San Francesco, by Julian Gardner. (Berkeley: University of California Press. 1994. Pp. xxiii, 452. $40.00.) For many years, even as the author produced his important monographs Two Churches: EnglandandItaly in the Thirteenth Century ( 1968) andRome BeforeAvignon: A SocialHistory ofThirteenth-CenturyRome ( 1974), Robert Brentano has cultivated a growing love affair and scholarly preoccupation with the small Abruzzese commune ofRieti. The resulting opus on this diocese, its bishops and cathedral canons in the high Middle Ages furnishes the student of Italian ecclesiastical life with everything he may reasonably want and be able to know about this humble ecclesiastical entity. With major studies on the ecclesiastical life of cosmopolitan Rome, the Archdiocese of Pisa (one focus of his Two Churches), and now tiny Rieti, Brentano has made a monumental contribution to the ecclesiastical and social history of the Italian peninsula. The work has modest historical and theoretical foundations because of the paucity of sources, but they deserve the more attention because Brentano exhaustively exploits such archival materials as are extant in Rome, Paris, and Rieti itself. With his title A New World, Brentano means to indicate that sometime after 1215 (Lateran ÏV), the diocese of Rieti changed from being a collection of isolated points of power and influence to a diocese in the more 430 BOOK REVIEWS modern sense, that is, an administratively profiled (if not in the imagined conventional sense of see, pieve, and parish) and yet unified space organized around the bishop's supervisory cure of souls as expressed in synodal constitutions . His argument is finely grounded and persuasive if not surprising: the few other Italian dioceses that have been seriously studied show that development at this time. Religion, as distinct from ecclesiastical matters, is not as prominent in Brentano 's account as the subtitle indicates. The author does analyze some surviving wills, to be sure. But the one significant holy native and relic Brentano turned up, for instance, is the obscure "Saint" Filippa Mareri (d. 1216), said to have imprisoned herself in her family palace and lived a holy life (cf. the comparable Cerchi woman in Florence). And the only hometown heretic, the Paolo Zoppo "chosen" for that role (p. 263) by the anti-Fraticelli Franciscan Inquisitor, seems worthy of note not because he allegedly convinced women to piously disrobe and lie with him, but because of the unusual accusations of bestiality (p. 237) against him and because he is said to have ordered at least one of the women in question to kneel or genuflect five or six times in his presence—presumably an instance of combined prayer and sexual gesture (p. 241). But evidence of more conventional religious behavior proved hard for the author to come by in his limited sources. The...