Cities of God: the Religion of the Italian Communes 1125-1325 (review)

In a world where many publishers question the value of lengthy monographs, Cities of God reminds us of their value. Augustine Thompson sets out to reorient the study of the early commune away from the political focus that continues to dominate the field. By doing so, his research is not only valuable for the period it covers but also yields insights and provides contexts for the study of religious beliefs and practices familiar to us from recent late medieval and Renaissance scholarship. Importantly, he does not make the mistake of framing his research in opposition to the 'secular' which allows him to penetrate the dynamic between secular institutions and the religious beliefs and practices of those who participated in them. This is indicative of his focus on the beliefs and practices of the laity, to which end he has divided his study into two parts. The first, 'Sacred Geography', is a detailed investigation of how religious buildings and holy places while usually owned by the church belonged to the communities who appropriated and used them. The second part, 'Religious Observance', analyses how people worshipped as a city, a neighbourhood, a family, and as an individual soul. Both sections demonstrate how the laity defined orthodoxy by common practices and the sacralization of common spaces.

Throughout, Thompson navigates a network of pitfalls. He states that 'Bishops, Cathedrals, the clergy and parish organizations ... were the context for the religious world of the citizen' (p. 6) but he neither imposes a rigid separation nor assumes an exact correlation between the institutions of the Church and lay practices. Rather, in the second third and fourth chapters, he analyses how lay people and secular institutions appropriated religious spaces, such as baptisteries and chapels, and felt them to be the property of the community. This was less about actual proprietorship than the way that the laity felt to have a tangible and day-to-day relationship with divinity, he argues persuasively. He complements his argument with numerous examples of the loyalty of and interaction between the clergy and the communities in which they were born and lived. In Chapter 6, an often 'too sharp a distinction between the "literate" piety of the clergy and the "popular" piety of the laity' (p. 339) comes under attack. Thompson argues that the high level of literacy in an Italian commune gave people access to a greater range of religious texts, which other scholars have assumed to be a bastion of a clerical few despite the proliferation of texts in Latin and vernacular. Cathedrals, texts, clergy and parish organizations were a context of which the laity was a part.

Thompson has tried to avoid homogenising the religious experiences and beliefs of the laity by giving numerous examples to show local and regional variations. He is perhaps at his strongest when discussing the local variations of rituals such as Mass in Chapter 6 and holy persons and holy places in Chapter 5. However, the evidence he gives sometimes suggests that the picture he presents may not always be so clear. For instance, when discussing the centrality of the Cathedral to orthodox and communal piety, there is a long list of activities that were forbidden in the vicinity including profaning the Cathedral or its piazza, robbery, littering, climbing the facade unless carrying out repairs, rock fights, prostitution, and gambling (pp.19-20). While these may be an example of how in legal texts 'a society speaks to itself about shared ideals and values' (p. 6), the range of activities proscribed suggests that there were elements of the community whose actions do not fit comfortably with the orthodoxy he presents. Yet it would be an exaggeration to say that each of these crimes implied that their beliefs were unorthodox or that they did not engage in many orthodox practices.

This example is indicative of a tendency to look at religious practices and...