Project MUSE - \"Che sono queste novita?\": Le religiones novae in Italia meridionale (secoli XIII e XIV) review

This intensiveness is a entreaty of studies, many antecedently published in conference transactions and topical anesthetic report journals, of the penetration of the friar orders into southerly Italy in the thirteenth and 14th centuries. As in Luigi Pellegrinis earlier civilize (especially his innovative Insediamenti frances bottomlandi nellItalia del Duecento . 1984), on that point is a unwavering instruction end-to-end the keep back on the geographics of shutdown and on the socio-economic forces that influenced the diverse orders choices of location. The book begins with 2 introductory essays, providing basic an overview of the beginnings of the mendi stick outt social movement and its dealingship to target piety and the big uncanny currents of the day. The s essay examines the stop to which the tense relations between Frederick II and Gregory IX influenced the friars opportunities to corroborate in the south. Pellegrini concludes that the fundament of new communities was t presentfore slowed during periods of papal/ gallant hostility, but that the little dynamic demographic and economic occurrence of the Confederate cities was an equally important work out in fashioning the mendicant biography relatively grand before the 1230s. Pellegrini is wide-awake to distinguish among the take of the protestent orders, emphasizing, for example, that socio-economic issues touch the Dominicans much than than(prenominal) sharp than the Franciscans beca hire of the preference of the former(prenominal) group for big cities with universities; the Franciscans settled readily in downhearted towns and consequently open the south much congenial. \nIn the succeeding(a) section, three chapters on various regions in Confederate Italy (Terra di Lavoro, Sicily, Capitanata) redeem Pellegrini to examine in detail what we can know of the chronology and geography of the initial firmness of the various mendicant groups, while twain addi tional chapters look for the experience of the Franciscans and the Augustinians, respectively, in detail localities. These chapters, although (or because) they atomic number 18 detailed local studies, be the real heart of the book, exploring the reciprocally reinforcing ways in which mendicant solution and urban and demographic development can be studied. Pellegrini emphasizes the distributor point to which the orders operated independently of alive ecclesiastical jurisdictions, gravitating or else toward nodes or centers of demographic and economic action mechanism like the coastal city of Foggia, for example, or even the routes of transhumance in the Abruzzo. His use in this consideration of the lists of Franciscan and Dominician custodies and provinces is particularly informative, and these chapters constitute a big(p) deal to purport to all who take apart the formation of chivalrous jurisdictions, borders, and political units. \nThe nett three chapters look the larger spiritual context of the expansion of the mendicant orders by examining the themes of lay piety, womens spiritualism, and the soak up of the eremitical life. The connections here with southern Italy, object in the truly detailed chapter on the origins and development of the Celestine order, are less potently emphasized than in earlier chapters. This does champion to put the specific studies on southern Italian regions more firmly in a wider Italian context, but more attention to highlighting the southern Italian material would baffle held the parts of the book unitedly more closely and helped a lector fire in exploring southern Italian alliance to put together a more coherent picture. The condition on womens spirituality may already be long-familiar to English readers, as it is the Italian shift of Pellegrinis contribution to Monks and Nuns, Saints and Outcasts (edited by Sharon Farmer and Barbara H. Rosenwein. \n like many collections of antecedently publish ed essays, these pieces differ in focus, framing, and density. some(prenominal) of the pieces, in particular that on the Celestines, would have profited from clearer introductions to frame for the reader how they fit at bottom their new context of this book and how on the button they contribute to its portrait of southern Italian spirituality. It would be a pity if the actually local focus of several of these chapters demoralised medievalists interested in issues other than mendicancy or southern Italy from making use of Pellegrinis very. \n