Patrons and Defenders: The Saints in the Italian City-states by Diana Webb (review)

788book reviews sheath Holbein designed, and interprets them within the context of Erasmian humanism and the Reformation. RichardTrexler examines lay piety in the New World, specifically the custom of holding conversations with cult effigies practiced by the indigenous peoples of Central and South America, which the Spaniards caUed "speaking with the DevU." Another pair of essays discuss the poUtical and social dimensions of public piety. Miri Rubin elucidates the meaning and symboUc value of late medieval Corpus Christi processions, warning against purely functionalist and narrowly political approaches to these public rituals. Peter Ochsenbein investigates the "Great Prayer of the [Swiss] Confederates," a long vernacular liturgy of the early sixteenth century, which the clergy and common people of rural Switzerland recited to ward off evil and reaffirm their political and social identity. The book's final section consists of one long essay by Heinrich Dormeier on the religious controversy over the moraUty of fleeing the plague. Through a careful analysis of letters, treatises, and sermons by humanists, clerics, and reformers in Italy and Germany, Dormeier reveals the spectrum of opinions on this question and shows how the issue of brotherly love graduaUy became the main focal point of the discussion by 1600. Steven D. Sargent Union College Patrons and Defenders: The Saints in the Italian City-states. By Diana Webb. [International Library of Historical Studies,Volume 4.] (London and New York: I. B. Tauris PubUshers. Distributed by St. Martin's Press, New York. 1996. Pp. vu, 343. $55.00.) Medieval and early modern Italy's burgeoning cult of saints has stimulated numerous recent studies written from social, reUgious, feminist, and urbanistic perspectives. Here, DianaWebb returns to politics to examine the role ofpatron and other saints' cults in the development of Italian civic culture in a manner reminiscent of but much ampler than H. C. Peyer's Stadt und Stadtpatron. Disavowing any claims to provide a study of the "interior state of religious devotion ," she reminds readers that "the Une between public and private devotions was, however, indistinct" (p. 26), and addresses "how the urban community, considered primarily as a poUtical entity ruled by laymen, came to employ the saints for its own purposes" (p. 6)—notably in the consolidation, articulation, and legitimation of pubUc power. Drawing on a wealth of saints' lives, miracle collections, chronicles, and especiaUy urban statutes and account books from dozens of northern Italian and particularlyTuscan cities from the fourth to the fifteenth century, she Ulustrates two essential developments; first, the transition in the twelfth century from ecclesiastical toward lay control of saints' cults, and BOOK REVIEWS789 then, from the thirteenth century onwards, the manner in which cities embraced additional cults to develop elaborate urban "pantheons." A brisk series of case studies Ulustrates how bishops from Ambrose onwards promoted cults ofpatron saints to bolster then own authority, and how church reformers such as Peter Damián in turn appealed to local cults to generate lay support for their own programs. But the poUtical attraction of saintly power lay precisely in its capacity to encompass broader urban communities and their countrysides. Webb teases out of her reticent sources evidence that over the twelfth century formerly passive audiences of the fidelis populus were transforming themselves into active communities ofeUte urban cives whose officials were increasingly assertive in the inventiones and translationes of saintly relics that enhanced the authority of their emerging communal governments. Growing civic control of patronal cults comes fully into view in the compilations of statutes that began to be produced in the thirteenth century.Without presuming an identity between legal precept and religious beUef and practice, Webb rightly underscores the statutes' ideological value as "affirmations of the values to which the rulers of urban society professed to subscribe on behatf of their subjects" (p. 95). Her richest chapters illustrate the patterns, motives, and modalities whereby civic governments expanded their calendars of pubUcly observed saints' days and elaborated their regulation of the rituals, oblations, and festivities by which they were observed. By 1200 most cities had either appropriated the cult of their bishop-patron, embraced a less-encumbered figure like Florence's Baptist or, as at Bologna, elevated a non-Petrine patron free of papal associations.The thirteenth...