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

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 urban 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. His use in this context of the lists of Franciscan and Dominician custodies and provinces is particularly informative, and these chapters have a great deal to offer to all who study the formation of medieval jurisdictions, borders, and political units.

The final three chapters explore the larger spiritual context of the expansion of the mendicant orders by examining the themes of lay piety, women's spirituality, and the pull of the eremitical life. The connections here with southern Italy, except in the very detailed chapter on the origins and development of the Celestine order, are less strongly emphasized than in earlier chapters. This does help to put the specific studies on southern Italian regions more firmly in a wider Italian context, but more attention to highlighting the southern Italian material would have held the parts of the book together more closely and helped a reader interested in exploring southern Italian society to put together a more coherent picture. The article on women's spirituality may already be familiar to English readers, as it is the Italian translation of Pellegrini's contribution to Monks and Nuns, Saints and Outcasts (edited by Sharon Farmer and Barbara H. Rosenwein (New York, 2000).

Like many collections of previously published essays, these pieces differ in focus, framing, and density. Several of the pieces, in particular that on the Celestines, would have profited from clearer introductions to frame for the reader how they fit within their new context of this book and how exactly they contribute to its portrait of southern Italian...