Florence and Its Church in the Age of Dante (review)

From 1250 to 1330 Florence suffered a succession of overlapping conflicts between Guelfs and Ghibellines, Black and White factions, popular and elite forces for which Dante famously blamed the papacy and its Angevin and Florentine Guelf allies. In his earlier study of Episcopal Power and Florentine Society 1000-1320 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard, 1991) pp. 145-153, George Dameron suggested that competition among Florentine lineages within the local church may have exacerbated the violence. Here, instead, aiming to refute the anticlericalism of Robert Davidsohn's much cited Storia di Firenze, he emphasizes that "the church played a constructive role institutionally, economically, culturally, and politically in the process by which Florence became the dominant commune in Tuscany" (p. 5).

The church was not monolithic. Dameron details the operations of Florence's myriad ecclesiastical institutions, emphasizing the importance of rural alongside urban contexts, secular and monastic as well as mendicant clergy, and underscoring the clergy's involvement in local dispute resolution (p. 32) and the development of confraternities and charitable institutions that "helped maintain social peace" (p. 52). Although papal interventions and Florentine politics provoked disputes, especially among the upper clergy, these "constituted social processes that channeled and reconciled . . . competing interests and constituencies" (p. 27).

Clergy comprised roughly 3% of the Florentine population (p. 82), controlled a quarter to a third of landed property (p. 114), and contributed 10-20% to the communal fisc in gabelle and other taxes (p. 152). Among the upper ranks Ghibellines disappeared (p. 81) and the influence of older aristocratic families waned (p. 97) while members of upwardly mobile popolano families rose thanks to their "political and economic connections with the papacy" (p. 105). Meanwhile two-thirds of the lower clergy lived on incomes below those of unskilled urban laborers (p. 128). Benefices varied greatly in value, tithes were unreliable, and many priests supplemented their incomes with mortuary fees, altar offerings, and testamentary legacies (pp. 133-135). While elite institutions profited from and stimulated Florence's expanding economy, rising episcopal, communal, and papal taxes in the 1320s fell most heavily on the lower clergy, precipitating a crisis in diocesan finance and experiments with clerical self-government (pp. 157-163).

Parochial clergy nevertheless ministered satisfactorily to their parishioners, who in their testaments and burial choices did not abandon them for the mendicants (p. 176). The doctrine of Purgatory became central to Florentine piety, serving "to vindicate, legitimize, and facilitate the culture of money-making and civic aggrandizement" (pp. 167-168) and offering the possibility of atoning for usury through charity to the poor and ecclesiastical benefactions. The Renaissance "cult of remembrance" identifed by Samuel K. Cohn, Jr. first emerged in late Duecento Florence: men endowed chapels "to imprint their names and those of their lineages," women patronized art "to benefit the spiritual needs of their communities" (p. 194).

From 1285 Florence passed a series of laws curbing ecclesiastical prerogatives that gave it the upper hand—despite nine interdicts—in "an unequal but generally collaborative partnership" with the church (p. 217). In turn, the inquisition "served to shore up religious orthodox beliefs and to encourage loyalty to the Guelf commune" (p. 229). Through elaborate ecclesiastical building projects and the ritual celebration of Florence's expanding circle of leading saints "the ruling elite of the city drew on established religious traditions to help construct a set of pro-Guelf guild-based beliefs that underscored the legitimacy of the post-1266 regime" (p. 224). Leading ecclesiastical institutions smoothed Florence's assertion of control over its surrounding territory (pp. 233-239) and helped mold "a composite but continually divided ruling class" (p. 241).

Church historians will welcome Dameron's regard for rural as well as urban settings and his emphasis on the ongoing importance of parish clergy even if his rebuttals of Davidsohn seem unnecessarily defensive. Political historians will surely agree that Rome and the local church were key to the formation of Florence's...