The Lay Saint

Charity and Charismatic Authority in Medieval Italy, 1150–1350

Mary Harvey Doyno

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781501740206
• eBook ISBN: 9781501740220
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

In The Lay Saint, Mary Harvey Doyno investigates the phenomenon of saintly cults that formed around pious merchants, artisans, midwives, domestic servants, and others in the medieval communes of northern and central Italy. Drawing on a wide array of sources—vitae documenting their saintly lives and legends, miracle books, religious art, and communal records—Doyno uses the rise of and tensions surrounding these civic cults to explore medieval notions of lay religiosity, charismatic power, civic identity, and the church's authority in this period.

Although claims about laymen's and laywomen's miraculous abilities challenged the church's expanding political and spiritual dominion, both papal and civic authorities, Doyno finds, vigorously promoted their cults. She shows that this support was neither a simple reflection of the extraordinary lay religious zeal that marked late medieval urban life nor of the Church's recognition of that enthusiasm. Rather, the history of lay saints' cults powerfully illustrates the extent to which lay Christians embraced the vita apostolic—the ideal way of life as modeled by the Apostles—and of the church's efforts to restrain and manage such claims.

PART ONE

Creating a Lay Ideal

CHAPTER 1

From Charisma to Charity

Lay Sanctity in the Twelfth-Century Communes

Sometime in the late eleventh century, Gualfardo, an Augsburg merchant, came to Verona on business, remained in the city and its surrounding countryside for the next thirty years, and upon his death was celebrated as one of that northern Italian city’s patron saints. Our knowledge of the layman comes from a vita that was likely written within a decade of his 1127 death.¹ That vita describes how after resolving to remain in Verona to live a pious life and give his earnings to the poor and sick, Gualfardo spent the next twenty years living as a hermit in the forest that surrounded the city.² A group of sailors eventually found the former merchant on the banks of the Adige River and convinced him to return to his adopted city. Gualfardo’s final ten years were spent as an ascetic in a cell within the Church of San Salvar, providing the Veronese with miraculous cures. Those cures seem to have most often been wrought through contact with Gualfardo’s hands. When Gualfardo waved his hands over the afflicted body parts of the lame, crippled, and blind, they were healed. And when the sick were washed with water the saint had used to wash his hands, their illnesses disappeared. Gualfardo’s hands were so integral to his burgeoning saintly reputation that once, when he returned to the Adige River after his move back to Verona’s city center, the river’s fish greeted him by licking his hands.³

At around the same time that Gualfardo was curing his fellow Veronese and being welcomed by its fish, another northern Italian layman, Allucio of Pescia (sometimes called Allucio of Campilgiano), was also gaining a following for his miraculous facility with the natural world. Allucio, his twelfth-century vita reports, spent his youth working as a shepherd. One day, in the midst of a menacing storm, he sheltered a herd of heifers. In thanks for his service to them, the animals encircled him, protecting him until his family found him, dry and free from injury, the next day.⁴

In addition to celebrating his special capacity with animals, Allucio’s vita also pays particular attention to the saint’s charitable efforts, describing the many hospices and churches he founded, the hungry he fed, and the sick and lame he cured. The accounts of such work emphasize how Allucio’s charity responded to an imbalanced social order. The reader is told that Allucio had once urged the bishop of Florence to build a bridge in Pescia across the Arno River after he had discovered that a group of nobles were profiting from the lack of a crossing. Moreover, when a hungry mother approached Allucio and asked him to “hold the hand of compassion” over her and her sons, the vita describes how he led the woman to a mill so that he could ask the miller if he would help feed her. When the miller replied that he had hardly any bread except for a bit of millet, Allucio encouraged the man to “give according to what you have,” for, as he noted, “God pays in return for all good things” and is “able to multiply our provisions.” When the miller returned to his chest and discovered it to be full with bread, “he rendered great thanks to God, increased his faith … and paid it more generously to the paupers.”⁵

Both Allucio’s and Gualfardo’s vitae make clear that it was these laymen’s extraordinary dedication to a penitential life—living with the fewest possessions possible, following a rigorous routine of prayer, and dedicating their lives to helping others—that earned them a saintly status. Their vitae see evidence of that status in the laymen’s ability to perform miracles during their lifetimes—they heal the sick with their hands, and multiply food supplies to feed the hungry. But Gualfardo’s and Allucio’s cults were far from the only lay civic cults that were appearing across northern and central Italy during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. André Vauchez has argued that the veneration of laymen like Allucio and Gualfardo served not only as evidence of the growing importance the laity played in late medieval religious life but also of the way in which lay religious activity in this period emphasized asceticism, pilgrimage, and charitable activities.⁶

And yet, while Gualfardo’s initial pilgrimage to Verona, and both men’s adherence to a life of penance and charity appear to be evidence of Vauchez’s threefold emphasis (asceticism, pilgrimage, and charity), when we look more closely at these laymen’s connection to the natural world and the miracles they performed, we see that they are primarily being celebrated for their charisma—the spiritual gifts that their extraordinary commitment to a penitential life allowed them to exhibit. In short, instead of drawing attention to their pious deeds (asceticism, pilgrimage, and charity)—and seeing those acts as the ultimate evidence of saintliness—these vitae present the laymen’s virtuous exploits as the steps necessary to produce the ultimate evidence of holiness: the ability to effect miraculous change.

In this chapter, I shall focus on another twelfth-century Italian urban lay saint, the merchant turned penitent, Ranieri of Pisa (d. 1160). It is within the first written and visual sources created to celebrate Ranieri that we find the most extensive evidence of a twelfth-century layman being celebrated more for his work as a living holy man than for his pious activities. In short, in the earliest cults of laymen in the Italian communes it is spiritual gifts or charisma, specifically the performance of miracles, and not pious actions like a dedication to penance, a rigorous prayer schedule, or charity work that stand as the most compelling proof for sanctity.⁷ The first sources created for Ranieri’s cult give us an opportunity to see not only a detailed portrait of this kind of lay charisma but also how threatening such claims must have been to the institutional church in the late twelfth century. By making an explicit connection between a layman’s extraordinary embrace of a penitential life and his ability to function as a new manifestation of Christ, Ranieri’s vita presents a powerful argument about the effects of lay sanctity. Ranieri’s penance brings about local as well as global change: it grants him spiritual gifts that allow him to heal both his city and his church.

Although asceticism, pilgrimage, and charity would become defining characteristics of late medieval lay religion and would eventually come to dominate the cults of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century lay saints, Ranieri’s early cult demonstrates how such a threefold identity was not emphasized in early lay saints’ cults but rather emerged out of Pope Innocent III’s efforts to redirect and reconceive of an ideal lay life. In Quia pietas, his 1199 bull of canonization for the merchant Omobono of Cremona (d. 1197), Innocent makes clear that a rigorous dedication to penance does not endow a layman with spiritual gifts. In Innocent’s portrait, a layman’s penance does not give him the power to heal with his touch, let alone reform the church. Instead, penance is one of a number of pious acts, along with prayer, charity work, and the fight against heresy that the lay saint executes in an exemplary manner. Far from performing the charismatic acts of a living holy man, in the papacy’s eyes, the lay saint attends to the spiritual and physical failings of his fellow lay population largely by demonstrating his piety and obedience to the institutional church.

Radical Reform: Ranieri of Pisa

The earliest evidence we have for a cult dedicated to Ranieri of Pisa is a vita and miracle collection, both likely written within a year of his death in 1160. The author of these texts was one of the saint’s disciples, Benincasa, who also served as the guardian of Ranieri’s tomb in Pisa’s cathedral and may have been a canon there as well.⁸ Relying upon events he witnessed as well as conversations he had with Ranieri, Benincasa traces the stages of the layman’s saintly life from his youth as the son of Pisan nobles and work as a merchant, to his first attempts at adopting a penitential life and eventual moment of conversion while on a business venture to the Holy Land. Finally, Benincasa recounts the many miracles Ranieri performed once he returned to Pisa as well as those that took place at his tomb after his death.⁹

The vita tells us that Ranieri’s penitential transformation was sparked by meeting Alberto of Corsica, another Pisan layman, who, after the death of his brother, had given all of his possessions to the poor and lived as a hermit at the church of San Vito in Pisa. Moved by Alberto’s example, Ranieri began to follow a rigorous schedule of prayer as well as of fasting, and eventually joined Alberto at San Vito, where we can assume (although Benincasa does not identify him as such) they lived as lay brothers (often called conversi).¹⁰ Benincasa makes clear that even though he had taken up a life of penance, Ranieri continued to work as a merchant. However, that professional life came to an end after a particularly eventful trip to the Holy Land. Benincasa writes that during a Good Friday service in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Ranieri received a vision of the Virgin Mary, which spurred him to strip off his clothes and replace them with what the text describes as a pilurica, likely some kind of hermit’s garb.¹¹ For the next seven years, Ranieri remained in Jerusalem, living as a dedicated penitent and hermit, experiencing frequent visions of the Virgin as well as of Christ.

Penance plays a crucial role as well in Ranieri’s religious life after his conversion. Benincasa de...

Table of contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One: Creating a Lay Ideal
• Part Two: The Female Lay Saint
• Part Three: From Civic Saint to Lay Visionary
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index