Living Like the Laity? The Negotiation of Religious Status in the Cities of Late Medieval Italy

Abstract

Framed by consideration of images of treasurers on the books of the treasury in thirteenth-century Siena, this article uses evidence for the employment of men of religion in city offices in central and northern Italy to show how religious status (treated as a subset of ‘clerical culture’) could become an important object of negotiation between city and churchmen, a tool in the repertoire of power relations. It focuses on the employment of men of religion as urban treasurers and takes Florence in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries as a principal case study, but also touches on the other tasks assigned to men of religion and, very briefly, on evidence from other cities (Bologna, Brescia, Como, Milan, Padua, Perugia and Siena). It outlines some of the possible arguments deployed for this use of men of religion in order to demonstrate that religious status was, like gender, more contingent and fluid than the norm-based models often relied on as a shorthand by historians. Despite the powerful rhetoric of lay–clerical separation in this period, the engagement of men of religion in paid, term-bound urban offices inevitably brought them closer to living like the laity.

By the labour of whose hands? Two reflections on the appreciation of work in medieval Christianity

“…However, and certainly till the High Middle Ages, religious status was often more contingent and fluid than one can infer from only this kind of source. 21 In the early medieval period, the majority of ordinary parish priests, secular canons and lower clergy were often much more integrated in the local communities in which they lived than can be presumed on the basis of most of the religious treatises and other traditional ecclesiastical source materials. In his research into early medieval guilds -which were at that time local sworn associations set up for mutual assistance, the remembrance of the dead, common banquets etc.…”