The pulpit and the press in Reformation Italy 9780674075290, 9780674072978

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Introduction (page 1)
1. Where Sermons Mattered (page 15)
2. Mendicant Preachers (page 54)
3. Sermons and Diocesan Reform (page 87)
4. Treatises for Laypeople (page 112)
5. The Generation after Trent (page 140)
Epilogue: Sermons and Their Reception (page 172)
Appendix: Key Preachers in Italy (page 183)
Notes (page 185)
Acknowledgments (page 251)
Index (page 255)

Citation preview

I TATTI STUDIES IN ITALIAN RENAISSANCE HISTORY

Sponsored by Villa I Tatti Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies Florence, Italy

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THE PULPIT AND THE PRESS IN REFORMATION ITALY

EMILY MICHELSON

~~~ "Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England

Copyright © 2013 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Michelson, Emily. The pulpit and the press in Reformation Italy / Emily Michelson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-0-674-07297-8

1. Reformation—lItaly. 2. Sermons—History and criticism. 3. Sermons—Italy. 4. Italy—Church history. I. Title. BR390.M53 2013 274.506—dc23 2012034735

For my father, in thanks

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Contents

Introduction I 1. Where Sermons Mattered 15

2. Mendicant Preachers 54 3. Sermons and Diocesan Reform 87

4. Treatises for Laypeople 112 5. The Generation after Trent 140 Epilogue: Sermons and Their Reception 172

Notes 185 Acknowledgments 251 Index 255

Appendix: Key Preachers in Italy 183

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THE PULPIT AND THE PRESS IN REFORMATION ITALY

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Introduction

I wrote this work only for my own benefit, because it seemed strange to me that although I read and I preached every day, I also said psalms every day, yet without understanding a word | was saying.’

With this apology, Francesco Panigarola, the most celebrated Italian preacher of the sixteenth century, identified a potent mixture: reading books, preaching sermons, understanding scripture, and making personal choices. According to those in his profession, it was this recipe, poorly handled, that had brought their era to religious catastrophe. This book follows Italian preachers like Panigarola as they found themselves on the front lines of a more desperate war than anything they had ever imagined. The war—the splintering of western Christendom into conflicting sects during the Reformation—was physically but also spiritually violent. Throughout the uncertainty, preachers had to keep preaching. For most people in the Catholic world, the sermon was the sole moment of comprehension in a religious culture that existed entirely in Latin, and it would remain so until the middle of the twentieth century.* In the Middle Ages,

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the sermon was the vehicle for nearly all religious education. The requirement to speak from the pulpit daily, weekly, or seasonally launched preachers

into the midst of battles they had not expected and did not welcome and forced them to confront the hottest controversies of their day. During the Reformation it was their job to help their flocks survive “the most radical and dangerous moment’ in the history of the Catholic Church, and in many ways of western religious history.° Such preachers could rely on centuries of professional tradition to help them with this new charge, but religious crisis also led to innovation. Many preachers turned to the printing press, extending the reach of their sermons

by remaking them as readable texts. The printed sermons that resulted served as models for later generations of Catholic reformers and as spiritual

guides for laypeople. These works became an essential tool both for preserving the Church in a time of tremendous uncertainty, and also for refashioning Catholicism for a new era. They reveal the emergence of a consensus

that would characterize Catholic culture for centuries to follow, but they also draw attention to the difficulties and contradictions within it. By deploying their pulpits, their pens, and their publishers, preachers in Italy sought to create a new religious culture that would survive in an unprecedented atmosphere of competition and religious choice. Above all, their sermons capture sixteenth-century Italy at one of its most uncomfortable moments: when Catholicism and Protestantism first collided.* Italy never became a Protestant region, but in the mid-sixteenth century, the danger seemed grave and the outcome uncertain. The Catholic Church faced unprecedented assaults on its theology and competition for its

laypeople. Social, religious, and cultural changes engulfed early modern Italy: changes in the Italian literary tradition, in the nature of religious authority, and in the technology used to disseminate ideas. Sermons bear testimony to all these currents, both violent and peaceful. By reading them, we learn how clergymen steered a course through the choppy waters of the sixteenth century: how they thought, and what they taught. The sermons express both the real and the perceived challenges facing the Catholic Church, as it struggled to adapt to new demands without compromising its traditions. They reveal preachers as the key agents in the re-creation and lasting survival of Catholic culture, and thus as the builders of many of the institutions that shaped the modern world.

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INTRODUCTION

Some of the men in this study, such as Cornelio Musso or Luigi Lippomano, were renowned and illustrious in their day; the power of their words and personalities gave their ideas broad influence. Others, such as Giovanni Del Bene or Evangelista Marcellino, were relatively unknown, but produced works that turned out to be practical and useful, and as a result reached clerics all over the peninsula. Yet others were anomalies, but they show us individuals who were privately confronting the same problems that troubled all of Europe and who sought to make their answers available to a wider public by printing them. This book concentrates primarily on the middle decades of the sixteenth century, when religious tensions between and within faiths were at their height. During this period, the religious landscape of Europe was wholly transformed. Laypeople increasingly sought to participate in religious life. The challenge of Protestantism had become impossible to ignore, but at the

same time, clear guidance from Rome was still lacking. The Council of Trent, which would thoroughly review major areas of Catholic doctrine and establish norms for reform, took a generation to complete (1545—-1563).’ The Tridentine decrees themselves took even longer to implement. During these decades, new institutions were born that would define the Catholic Church

in Italy and the world for the following centuries, including the Jesuits and other new religious orders, the Tridentine liturgy, the Congregation of the Holy Office, and the Index of Forbidden Books. This was the period of greatest challenge for a preacher, but it was also the time of greatest independence and influence. In response, preachers embraced the press. The printing of Italian sermons skyrocketed after 1540, and preachers began editing and packaging their own works for publication. For the first time, readers could buy sermons written by their contemporaries, and the volumes they chose would permeate the Italian book world into the seventeenth century. I. To these preachers and their audiences, the biggest threat to religious unity came not from Protestant iconoclasm, although it was violent, and not from

Protestant theology, although it upended Church hierarchies. What upset them, instead, was the Protestant promise of sola scriptura, the idea that scripture could be read directly, free from the interpretative traditions that had accreted to it through 1500 years of apostolic commentary. What seemed

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like liberation to Luther seemed like arrogance to Catholics. In their view, scripture was powerful but dangerous. To approach it without the wisdom of earlier theologians was to think oneself smarter than the greatest minds of the past. It could easily lead to misinterpretation, and thence to quick damnation.

This led Catholic preachers to a conundrum. They had to find ways to

continue, or adapt, their own traditions of preaching scripture without leading the faithful astray, even though interest in the Bible and knowledge of its contents had quickly become a hallmark of Protestant sympathy. The problem was unprecedented, and individual preachers had little guidance from authoritative sources. As a result, their sermons and other writings

repeatedly discussed whether, when, where, and how to teach scripture to the laity. The scripture question is therefore the primary test case for this study.

The conclusions these men reached appeared in a variety of genres: sermon collections, guides for preachers, and treatises. Sermons published strictly because they were delivered from a pulpit and later transcribed are inseparable from the broader body of sermon literature: sermons reprinted as examples for future preachers, or collections of passages for use in sermon composition, or even many devotional treatises and exegetical literature. Those who composed such works had often preached the material earlier, and those who read them often found in them material for future sermons.° Many libraries in Italy and quite a few in the United States and Britain possess volumes of these sermons in copious numbers, but their content and their very existence have been all but ignored in modern depictions of early modern religious life, especially in English. Yet they contain some of the earliest articulations of typically post-Tridentine attitudes toward scripture,

and more broadly, toward the faithful; they show the future face of Catholicism. Preachers decided early on that the safest way to learn scripture was by hearing it: Bishops should explain the gospels in church, in yearround preaching. The laity’s job was to listen, not read.’ The Council of Trent would codify this formula, and much of the Roman Church’s energy and attention would shift, in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to the pastoral efforts of bishops. Although they came to agree on how to teach scripture, preachers often

took widely varying stances on its inherent nature and accessibility;

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INTRODUCTION

agreement did not mean uniformity. They show a range of acceptable opinions and approaches within the Catholic fold. Even on a topic as essential as scripture, reform efforts did not require an unvarying policy; they accommodated preachers’ individual personalities and judgments and allowed for, in Simon Ditchfield’s terminology, regularization rather than standardiza-

tion. Preachers contradicted each other—and sometimes themselves— without, for the most part, calling their own orthodoxy into question. Doctrinal variation was part of Catholic orthodoxy in the years before the close of the Council, and it continued in print long afterwards. Any conclusions about actual social or religious change must be firmly grounded in descriptive sources as well as prescriptive ones, and must consider the imperfections of transmission as the step between theory and practice.” Perhaps no material is better suited for this work than the sermons of ordinary preachers. Preachers not only reflected but also created the broader metamorphosis of the Catholic Church in the age of reform. They voiced

support for embattled Church institutions (such as the Council itself), helping to stabilize them. By teaching simultaneously about the need to know scripture and the need to obey the clergy in interpreting it, preachers acknowledged lay needs while also reinforcing traditional clerical authority.

They increasingly focused their attention on humbler and less educated groups of laity—those who had the most to gain from the Protestant message of lay empowerment, who were therefore considered to be the most at risk of apostasy, and whose growing demand for scriptural access demanded reply. Above all, preachers recognized that they had entered a new era, one in which they had to compete for the loyalty and the souls of the laity. The sermons in their volumes thus became the foundational building blocks of modern Catholicism—but they are vast and rich even beyond this and have a great deal still to tell us about the perspective and concerns of the early modern world. II. For many historians, especially social historians, the high point of Italian preaching is found in the vibrant sermons of late medieval preachers such as Bernardino of Siena or Girolamo Savonarola, filled with exempla, parables, and real-world metaphors; the subsequent centuries receive little mention." Scholars of later periods writing in English have concentrated on sermons given at the most elite level, in Latin, and in decades well on either side of

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the Reformation crisis.'’ A revived interest in preaching over the past two decades has now laid a path for examining sermons as a broad genre that medi-

ated between different social groups. Studies of preaching in Europe have increasingly emphasized vernacular sermons, the central role of preachers in their societies, and the importance of preachers’ monastic training.'* Despite

their centrality to religious life and social culture on the Italian peninsula, Italian vernacular sermons have received far too little attention as conveyers of reform.

Attention to these sermons redirects many older accounts of the course of the Reformation. Scholars generally agree that the growth of Lutheranism and other denominations posed a crisis for the Roman Church, but they have disagreed about the nature of that crisis, and about what the Italian response to it means for religious history. The most stereotypical of these pictures is based on the “no book, no Reformation” German model.'? That familiar

cliché assumes that Protestants succeeded by preaching and printing, and that Catholics’ efforts on those fronts were reactionary, dogmatic, and uncreative. In this version of events, the Roman Church's only response to the Reformation crisis was to pursue its own survival and the allegiance of its faithful at any cost. Its defensiveness ensured that the lasting Catholic contribution to religious development was the Inquisition; its contribution to book history was censorship. Innovations within Catholicism, though influential, were nonetheless elaborate forms of obedience—Ignatius Loyola’s Jesuit order or Carlo Borromeo’s model of episcopacy. Moreover, the individuals who spearheaded these new models were not easily imitated. By failing to engage in the novel concerns of Protestants, according to this thinking, the Roman Church also failed fully to enter the modern world.” Long-standing stereotypes of Catholicism as monolithic and repressive have thus persisted in both the academic and the popular mindset, despite half a century’s worth of challenges. But on the eve of the Reformation, Italy’s preachers were among the era’s most dynamic and beloved. Its presses

had dominated the religious print industry for decades. Neither party suddenly fell silent in the face of religious threats, particularly when those threats were seen to come from the same two strengths: preaching and printing. The copious works written and published by Italian preachers challenge the primarily continental model of progressive Protestantism and reactionary Catholicism.”

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INTRODUCTION

Scholars who look more closely into Italian Catholic affairs have often described a similarly stark contrast, but have defined its poles differently; in

their depiction, the Protestant challenge pitted two groups of Italian reformers against each other: the broad-minded spirituali, a group of learned clerics and laypeople who accommodated ideas receptive to some Protestant theology, and the repressive intransigenti or zelanti, who ultimately forced the Church to reject any position of tolerance or flexibility. In this picture, the small size of each group made its members easier to identify. The direction of Catholic reform was settled at the most elite levels, and for ill; the

increasing influence of the Holy Office on the Council of Trent over time ensured the eventual success of the intransigente position.'° Scholars bemoan the triumph of the intransigenti’s repressive restrictions over spirituale progressive hopes. Although scholarship in English increasingly questions the strictness of the spirituali/intransigenti divide, it dies hard, especially in Italian scholarship.””

Recent attempts to soften these dichotomies have emphasized that Catholic reform did not take place in a vacuum, nor was it a unidirectional force that successfully streamlined and homogenized ecclesiastical practice.

Instead, they emphasize continuity with past reform movements, competing models of reform, cooperation among supposed antagonists, and local resistance to a centralizing Church authority.'"* Some even emphasize local variation to the point of asserting that “the Church” as “a coherent if not monolithic organization with a clear doctrine . . . was never achieved. The ‘Church’ itself was made up of competing institutions and individuals, following different ideal ‘models,’ or selfish interests.””” These schools of thought share the assumption that reform practices or attitudes were not simply measured and discarded until a victor emerged. Their adherents instead emphasize the concurrence of seemingly opposite approaches, indebted to Hubert Jedin’s endorsement of the term “Catholic Reform and Counter-Reformation” to explain coexisting tendencies within orthodoxy.”° John O’Malley recommends the term “Early Modern Catholicism” for this period, in order to draw the focus of study away from binary

questions of reform and toward a broader and more holistic view of the period as one in which Catholic identity was renewed and reconfirmed.”' Adriano Prosperi has argued that the Inquisition succeeded in exercising its power in Italy, thereby Catholicizing and bureaucratizing Italians, through

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a twofold approach consisting of coercion and persuasion.** The preachers in this study substantiate such an approach by refusing to settle into easy or predictable categories even as they promoted increasingly strict doctrinal positions. III. These broader attempts to capture the religious complexities of the six-

teenth century are often deployed to explain the later course of Italian history: why Protestantism gained so little official foothold, and how modernization was achieved.

On the first point, if we could ask the preachers in this study whether they thought Italy had a Protestant reformation, to a man they would have said yes. That is why their efforts were so fervent.*? Unlike elsewhere in Europe, Italy’s “Protestants,” at the time, were largely indistinguishable from its Catholics. In German- or French-speaking regions, denominational lines were more clearly and politically drawn. In Catholic Spain, a powerful monarchy managed religious affairs, and fears of Lutheranism bled into

fears of marginalized Judaizers and Moriscos. But in Italy the seam of reformers was broad, influential, and extremely hard to delineate. It was inextricable from the wide range of opinions and positions within Catholicism before 1563.74 Over the course of the 1540s and 1550s, as confessional lines

hardened throughout Italy and Europe, many reform-minded Italians increasingly had to choose sides. Prominent examples in Italian historiography ended up across the denominational spectrum; they included—to give the briefest sample—Pier Paolo Vergerio, Bishop of Capodistria until his rejection of Catholicism and his flight out of Italy; Giulia Gonzaga, patron, editor, and friend of many convicted or suspected heretics, who died in her convent; and Cardinal Reginald Pole, who championed justification by faith and shielded reformers during his decades in Italy, but who also served as papal legate during the first period of Trent and later returned to England to administer Marian reform as Archbishop of Canterbury. Many Catholics continued to regard Pole as with suspicion as a philo-Protestant, but the celebrated preacher Franceschino Visdomini, among others, championed his role in restoring England to the Roman faith.” Those who ended up explicitly heterodox, or who harbored known sympathies toward aspects of Protestant doctrine, have received by far the most attention in this period’s history, especially for the years between 1540 and 1570. But in fact it is

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INTRODUCTION

only in retrospect, and anachronistically, that their positions can be classified. Heresy as a distinct body of thought was defined only in the prosecuting of it.*°

The same crucible also forged new definitions of Catholicism. In scholarship, the orthodox side has been represented either by Catholic apologetic or local, parochial histories, or later by studies of religious institutions such as the Holy Office.*” This book, instead, examines some of the individuals who helped to draw the new, darker borders of orthodoxy or who manned those borders—including some who tried many options before determining their final position and others who simply adhered to those boundaries from the outset and reinforced them by writing and preaching. The second point, modernization, is best explained through the confessionalization thesis, which argues that the religious reformations helped to modernize Europe: As religious denominations, or confessions, became distinct from each other, they all imitated and cooperated with civil modes of governance. This increase in administration and institutionalization of religious practice supported the emerging state system. Scholars within Italy have returned to confessionalization, and its related term, social discipline,

to describe increasing hegemony and repressiveness within the Roman Church, as well as an increased centralization and bureaucracy, all in the name of proving Catholicism’s contributions to general history and the ultimate “cultural profile, however differentiated, of modern western Christians.””°

This approach promoted the study of orthodoxy and emphasized institutional or ecclesiastical history, especially of the Inquisition, episcopal visita-

tions, or new religious orders, but it also included renewed attention to methods of surveillance and intimidation. In doing so it has sometimes returned to old stereotypes through new methodology. Harsh terms such as social discipline and institutional force have not precluded complex and ambiguous readings of confessionalization. Even

when considered from a top-down institutional perspective, enforcing behavior and winning hearts were two sides of the same coin. As Adriano Prosperi has shown, bishops, members of religious orders, parish priests, and Inquisitors all shared the common goal of re-Catholicizing Italy, using the various coercive or persuasive tools at their command.” Some pictures of Catholic confessionalization start from the bottom, emphasizing the

active participation of laypeople and their appropriation of devotional

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THE PULPIT AND THE PRESS IN REFORMATION ITALY practices, well beyond the efforts of bishops and Inquisitors. The very terms “discipline” and “confessionalization” imply an inflated level of effectiveness and success, when in fact local case studies reveal a much more equivocal but richer picture of negotiation, manipulation, appropriation, failure, and “undiscipline.”’®

The preachers and bishops in this study best meet this last description in seeking, like Prosperi’s persuasive coercers, to do everything. They wanted to preserve the orthodoxy of their flock and maintain the authority of the

Roman Church, while also responding to an undeniable lay demand for inclusion and participation. They lived in contradiction, trying to give laypeople all the access to scripture they demanded, while making sure to prevent any false and dangerous interpretations. They fought for their roles as preachers while recognizing the structure of a Church that had changed around them. As Luigi Lippomano, Bishop of Verona, demonstrated, preachers were compelled to confront circumstances they did not welcome, and so their encounters were not always successful. Lippomano introduced his great work on lay orthodoxy by grumbling, “I regret in my very soul doing this task, but necessity forces me to it. . .””’ Preachers were flanked in these endeavors by more dramatic and explicit innovators—members of new religious orders, especially Jesuits, and affiiates of new institutions, such as Inquisitors. For the most part, the preachers

in this study steered a middle course. They did not subscribe to explicit innovation on either side of the confessional line, nor were they, for the most part, either famously seduced out of the Catholic fold or famously prosecu-

torial within it. In the end they are the barely known mainstream, mostly left out of other historical accounts of this change: neither Inquisitors, nor heretics, nor Jesuits, nor primarily bishops. Yet in practicing the Church's oldest and most popular form of teaching, they accelerated the dramatic evolution of early modern religion. Trained in educating and moving their listeners, they had the potential for profound emotional and religious influence. When they turned to the printing press, they could make that influence reach across the peninsula.

In arguing for the importance of preachers in Reformation Italy, this study also seeks to redress a number of other wrongs. It subscribes broadly to the confessionalization thesis in that it portrays the creation of a new Catholic culture and identity through the contestation of heretical others

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INTRODUCTION

and through the imposition of a new set of behavioral standards—but it also sees those processes as the products of personal decisions, contradictions, and failures. Its protagonists do not fit neatly into institutional or class dis-

tinctions; they range from powerful cardinals to relatively humble or unknown priests. By stepping up their efforts to keep the laity loyal and the heretics at bay, and by arguing in print for the best tactics in that battle, they also show the increasing professionalization of the clergy that became a hallmark of a confessionalized Church.” While recognizing that the criticism of abuses long preceded Luther, the

texts studied here document responses to Lutheran and other Protestant innovations. This study therefore also generally describes the “CounterReformation” while demonstrating, I hope, the insufficiency of that term. The course of that countering was not inevitable, or simple. It was the product of many decisions, by individual people who cannot easily be reduced into camps. They reveal heterogeneous, individualized approaches to reform and scripture among the Church’s most trusted and orthodox representatives. Reform, therefore, was determined not simply through debates between a few men within elite factions at Trent, but through the efforts of scores of unremembered preachers in hundreds of sermons both heard and

read. Their actions show that the “reform tendency” that characterized many spirituali and their known opponents also extended to a broader crosssection of clerics and could tend in more than one direction.” There is no doubt that many of the preachers’ measures arose out of fear of heresy and distaste for the laity. But for the preachers in this study, the

social discipline obtained in the regularization of preaching and in the teaching of obedience was but one aspect of the greater task of protecting souls from heresy and creating a new Catholic culture, which encouraged more pious, more engaged Catholics. Scholars need to take into account that Catholic reactions to heresy, even in indisputably Catholic areas, could be as diverse as the new confessions they opposed.** IV. The title of this book includes the infrequently used phrase “Reformation Italy,’ which more typically refers to Protestant activity in Italy. That is not the sense I intend here; I use it because this book’s protagonists were overwhelmingly concerned with reform—not only the Protestant Reformation

that propelled much of their activity, but also the reform of the Roman [| m1 |

THE PULPIT AND THE PRESS IN REFORMATION ITALY Church and of the souls of its followers. More common terms for sixteenth-

century Italy, such as Early Modern or High Renaissance, draw attention away from these themes. Nor is “Reformation Italy” intended as yet another contribution to the debate about what to call Catholic activity in this period. It is a reflection of the priorities of my subjects, and a conscious use of the word “reformation” as a universal, not denominational, term. The following five chapters will thus examine how preachers in different contexts, working in different genres, helped to reshape Catholic identity during the tumultuous sixteenth century. The first chapter examines the many ways people encountered sermons in the sixteenth century and the contexts where sermons mattered: as part of Mass on Sundays and festivals, as public spectacles every day of Lent, and in their printed form, as

private aids to religious devotion and as teaching manuals for other preachers. Many sixteenth-century sermon practices were inherited from the Middle Ages, but distinctly new phenomena such as the Protestant threat, episcopal reform, growing opportunities for lay participation, and the Council of Trent led to a crisis of authority in which traditional guides for preachers became insufficient. Chapter 1 also describes the development of different groups of preachers with different rhetorical styles: educated

elite preachers from mendicant monastic orders and bishops or secular priests in dioceses.” It places the printing of sermons in the context of sixteenth-century book culture by describing how sermon literature could be printed and marketed. Chapter 2 examines the practices and impact of elite Franciscan preachers with access to power, arguing that preachers who were present at the Council of Trent were unusually influential in publicizing its messages and in seeking to combat Protestantism. Cornelio Musso (1511-1574) and Franceschino Visdomini (1516-1573) were closely linked to the Council and its powerful delegates. In marked contrast to many of their contemporaries, they used their status to convey new Tridentine ideas about scripture. They supported the decisions of the Council and actively promoted its authority in their sermons, creating a more explicit doctrinal position than their contemporaries. Yet even a Tridentine agenda did not create uniformity of opinion; even Musso and Visdomini differed in their answers to the key question of how to teach scripture. Chapter 3 explores the difference of opinion between two other preachers,

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INTRODUCTION

this time in a diocesan context. The Roman Church’s principal answer to the question of how to teach scripture, and of how to protect and educate the

laity, lay ultimately not with traditional mendicant preachers but with the diocesan bishop. It relied increasingly on its bishops to oversee Catholic reform and education. Bishops and their staff addressed new challenges and a different population as they took up the task of preaching and residing in their dioceses for the first time in centuries. Yet they faced many of the same

problems as their mendicant counterparts. Chapter 3 analyzes the reform messages of two early and respected bishops from the generation before Borromeo: Luigi Lippomano in Verona and Girolamo Seripando in Salerno. Both of these men played important roles on the national stage and at the Council of Trent. Both embarked with energy and enthusiasm on the task of reforming their dioceses. Nonetheless, a close analysis of their sermons and episcopacies reveals divergent attitudes toward the laity and toward the process of reform and pedagogy. Their personal attitudes and emotions infused the process of reform at every level, making it an inevitably heterogeneous, and sometimes inconsistent, process. Luigi Lippomano also sought to reach the faithful by producing a treatise in Italian on Catholic doctrine and the refutation of heresy. He was not the only preacher to do so. Chapter 4 identifies five such works as a distinct

genre within the larger body of vernacular anti-Protestant polemic. This group of treatises shows that preachers went to great lengths to reach the uneducated laity using new media, even when their skills were better suited to other genres. In these works, preachers tackled difficult questions about how to provide an orthodox religious education to the faithful. The various answers they proposed anticipate the decisions of the Council of Trent and provide early indications of the direction of the Roman Church in the postTridentine period, but at the same time, they reveal unwitting problems in the clerical approach to lay education and reform. The final chapter of the book points to the future of Italian preaching by analyzing the new role mendicant preachers created for themselves in the

midst of a rapidly changing religious culture. It argues that the later sixteenth century witnessed a revitalization of preaching styles. Mendicant ser-

mons contributed to the re-creation of Catholicism by emphasizing the glories of Rome and of the Catholic Church at large. In so doing, they brought to a wider audience the same priorities as the Latin orators at the

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papal court. At the same time, they increasingly emphasized scriptural exegesis and comprehension in their sermons, making a point of explaining

that the laity should be educated and informed, not merely obedient. Mendicant preachers showed increasing mastery of the innovations of the printing press. They took explicit pride in their books’ appearance and employed a wide range of printing techniques, believing that this would make their books more effective and successful. The epilogue continues that story by examining ways we might assess the lasting influence of both mendicant and diocesan sermon volumes into the seventeenth century, using newly available data on book circulation.

These Italian sermons capture a moment in early modern history between oral and written culture, between Christian unity in Europe and its permanent fracture, between potential directions of reform. Such great uncertainty translated for many people into great fear. Catholic preachers feared that the many changes they witnessed—from Protestants, among their own leadership, and in the very laity they served—would ultimately devastate both the temporal and the spiritual worlds. Their sermons gave voice to those fears, but the sermons also show, equally, how fear is not the whole story. They suggest that it is misleading to overstate the extent of the Church’s anxieties. Preachers used their sermons and writings to contemplate a variety of solutions to the chaos that they felt might engulf them. Their individual voices draw a picture of Catholic reform that is not purely about obedience, authority, or clerical factionalism, but also about personal, emotional, dedicated, and wide-ranging efforts to save souls.

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I Where Sermons Mattered

When two confessed Protestants in Milan sought to repent of their heresy, their return to Catholic society was chaperoned by Angelo Castiglione, a Carmelite monk and preacher. In October 1553, before a large crowd at the cathedral of Milan, Castiglione preached a sermon inviting the heretics to atone in a public ceremony.’ “Until now,” he proclaimed, the two men had held “heretical, Lutheran, and sacramentarian opinions, but now,

illuminated with the truth by the grace of God, they have retreated from

their errors, and have come to despise them in their very souls. This morning, in plain view in this church, when the sermon is over, they intended to renounce them . . . and abjure every heresy, position, and dogma contrary to the Catholic faith.” In his sermon, Castiglione described how easily heresy could tempt a person. “Poisonous” books written in the vernacular were readily available,

he explained, and readers, with their wild imaginations and passionate biases, were all too likely to misunderstand what they read. Above all, said Castiglione, the greatest provocation to heresy was arrogant self-reliance: All those who without humility, without the spirit of God, arro-

gantly relying on their own strength and ingenuity, have

THE PULPIT AND THE PRESS IN REFORMATION ITALY attempted to explain and preach the holy scripture, have erred terribly, and fallen into a thousand errors, and slid into many heresies, however learned they were, however armed with manmade doctrines, however practiced and versed in sacred letters ... Because in their understandings and expositions of Holy Scriptures, they departed from Catholic opinion, disdained the authority of the universal Church, and stubbornly adhered to their own findings, they are heretics.’

Churchmen throughout the Italian peninsula faced unprecedented religious turmoil in Castiglione’s day. Castiglione’s sermon captures many of their worries. He feared a total and imminent infiltration of heterodox thought and told his listeners to pray for the preservation of Catholic doctrine against corruption in every congregation, college, confraternity, place, city, and realm. He believed that the biggest problem with heretics was their misuse of scripture; he saw it as a hostile takeover from which stemmed all their other errors. But Castiglione also believed that the best antidote to heresy was not simple obedience to Catholic authority; moral behavior and true devotion were equally necessary. He told his listeners not to congratulate themselves if they merely avoided heresy. Rather, they must seek to live by the promises of their baptism. Anything less might lead them astray. Castiglione sought to balance antiheretical polemic with pro-Catholic pedagogy. Above all, Castiglione put his faith in sermons. By preaching so publicly, he showed his conviction that a sermon was his best, most effective weapon against the perceived onslaught. He collected his sermons for the rest of his life and published them as a three-volume set with the official printers of the archbishop of Milan, thirty years after he preached for the penitent heretics.* One of Castiglione’s colleagues would make the point thus: “The first way to discuss divine things, as established by Saints Peter, Paul, all the apostles, and by Christ himself in the gospel, is through public sermons; then through disputes, and finally through consultations.” By publishing his sermons, Castiglione also joined a venerable group of preachers who felt that sermons must be both heard and read in order to do their best work.

Public religious life developed dramatically in sixteenth-century Italy, with the founding of new and energetic monastic orders, the growth of confraternities, new commitments to religious education, and the development

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WHERE SERMONS MATTERED

of new devotions. Preaching played a critical role in all of these. The sermons of Castiglione and his colleagues thus highlight some of the Roman Church’s most profound changes: the rise of the reforming bishop, the simultaneous continuation and reassessment of medieval practices, and above all the redefinition of Catholic identity and the emergence of a narrower, stricter, path of

orthodoxy through the broad field of positions that had characterized the late medieval period and the opening decades of the sixteenth century.

Mendicant and Diocesan Preaching In the late Middle Ages, itinerant hermits, often self-appointed prophets, wandered the country preaching apocalyptic doom. At the other end of the social spectrum, the country’s best preachers wielded great influence at the sumptuous papal court, where they wrote elegant Latin sermons to be recited before the pope.° The sermons in this study fall between these two extremes. They were intended to reach broad swaths of Christendom, and they were usually delivered on feast days, on Sundays after Mass, or during the liturgical seasons of Advent, preceding Christmas, and especially Lent, the forty days before Easter. Such preaching permeated Italian culture. It became a form of public religion alongside processions and public ceremonies, where the laity could derive both personal and social spiritual benefits from participating together in religious rituals. Sermons were also a form of public entertainment, and a sermon audience was a desirable place to be seen. Popular preachers traditionally filled churches to capacity or had to move outside to the adjoining piazza in order

to accommodate the crowds. The introduction to the printed version of Castiglione’s 1553 sermon boasted that it drew fifteen thousand listeners who could not all hear him no matter how much he shouted. Local governments invited illustrious preachers to their cities and competed with each other to

get the best ones. During Lent, sermons were delivered daily as a cycle, instead of weekly or on feast days. A preacher with a good reputation could spend nearly his entire career traveling from city to city, taking up temporary residence and delivering a sermon cycle to the local population. As a result of the close connections that grew up between preachers and citizens,

traveling preachers were often credited with restoring peace and establishing good citizenship in the cities they visited.’

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THE PULPIT AND THE PRESS IN REFORMATION ITALY Preachers were meant to embody the Word of God and transmit it to the laity. Both their rhetorical skill and their personal presence were considered

reflections of divine grace; they were judged in part by how well they recalled the earliest apostles in their lives as well as their words. Nobody questioned a sermon’s intended effect on listeners: preachers were always supposed to transform the hearts of their listeners and bring them closer to God. By encouraging individual penitence, sermons sought to effect divine harmony by increasing social harmony.* When progress toward that harmony was threatened, preachers were divinely charged to respond. On the eve of the Reformation, then, there was no better way to broadcast criticism, change, or moral encouragement than through preaching. Egidio da Viterbo famously used his sermon opening the Fifth Lateran Council (1512-1517) to call for improved clerical behavior and a purified, renewed Church. In the face of the religious predicaments that characterized the early part of the century—clerical corruption, the lay desire for scripture, Lutheran and other schisms, the long stagger toward the Council of Trent—preachers responded in the pulpit, as they did to Turkish and French invasions and royal deaths or coronations. This is one reason sermons provide a revealing window into sixteenth century society; they can show reactions to current events. Egidio was the prior general of the Augustinian order; Castiglione was a Carmelite. Like them, most medieval preachers were members of monastic orders. From the first years of their existence in the thirteenth century, the

mendicants, particularly Franciscans and Dominicans, made preaching

their specialty. Both orders were founded to serve the laity through preaching. They specialized in “missionary” sermons as opposed to liturgical ones: Their sermons originally took place not during Mass, but whenever and wherever they might find a crowd to listen—in a town square or field—and they called on listeners to repent of sinful behavior. Francis of Assisi, known for preaching even to birds, is the most famous exemplar. Because these orders were known for their loyalty to the pope, their dedication to preaching, and a lack of bureaucratic infrastructure, they were flexible travelers and thus ideal itinerant preachers.’ The profile of these mendicants only increased in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. When the papacy returned to Rome in 1415 after more than a century of absence and schism, its credibility and authority were

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sorely compromised. Mendicants stepped up their sermonizing in order to help repair the damage. They preached that the Church was the sole dispenser of salvation, and they addressed directly the social disorder that Italy had seen during the papacy’s absence.'® Many previously sporadic opportunities for preaching, such as parochial sermons on feast days and daily preaching during Lent, were made habitual. Some mendicant preachers took up permanent positions in cathedrals and city churches, while trav-

eling preachers made more frequent rounds. During Lent, the visiting preacher held his sermons every day after Mass, often in front of as much of the population as could squeeze into the central piazza of the city; it was a season of preaching. By the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Franciscans and Dominicans reigned as preachers, informed by centuries of tradition. Of the 181 preachers who preached in Bologna’s Cathedral of San Petronio between 1450 and 1550, for example, all but six were Franciscan or Dominican (or Lateran canons, who had their house nearby). Dominicans preached thirty-four preaching

cycles, but Franciscans, in their various subbranches, had the most, with thirty-two cycles preached by Conventual Franciscans and twenty-three by Observant Franciscans. Conventuals typically had a university education, which gave them a thorough grounding in Latin and Greek authors and the ability to create refined, stylized oratory influenced by classical humanism. They often lived in monasteries near university centers and soon became the most sought-after preachers in universities, ecclesiastical and secular courts, and illustrious cities. Franciscan preachers were so influential in circles of power that the Franciscan motif of preaching “vice and virtue” ultimately influenced the text of Tridentine decrees on preaching.” Scholarship on preaching—in Italy and elsewhere—tends therefore to equate preachers with these elite mendicants. In contrast, the secular clergy in the dioceses—priests who had joined no monastic order and who owed obedience to bishops—rarely preached at all, despite being charged with the care of souls and the supervision of sermons. Bishops and archbishops, usually nobles, might have had the education to preach, but they often chose to spend most of their time at the papal court in Rome, where they could live in splendor and stay close to the center of power, rather than in the remote dioceses that paid their income. Before the Council of Trent, it was entirely

possible and not uncommon for a bishop to receive a lifelong stipend, or

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benefice, from a diocese with which he had no particular connection and of which he had no local knowledge, and which he might never visit during his episcopacy. He might frequently enjoy the benefices of multiple dioceses at once but make his home in none of them. Bishops commonly devoted their time to diplomatic, administrative, and scholarly pursuits while enjoying the income from dioceses that vicars or other clerics ran in their absence. In addition, those vicars and curates whom the absentee bishops left behind to govern in their place often had no interest in preaching or no education to

teach them how to do it. At the bottom of the social spectrum, the local priest of an impoverished parish might not even have known enough Latin to understand the words of the Mass he performed, and he certainly would have had few chances to develop his rhetorical skills. Thus at the start of the sixteenth century, a city’s best-known preachers were likely to be Franciscan or Dominican monks, either living in a nearby monastery or traveling from town to town as itinerant preachers, filling in for secular clergy with little training or impetus to preach. Gasparo Contarini’s De Officio Viri Boni et Probi Episcopi, from 1517, described preaching in dioceses

as a distant dream: “I admonish the bishops of our day against completely omitting the very ancient practice preserved most carefully by our fathers: those illustrious men were wont . . . to give asermon to the whole people . . . This task the religious in our times have usurped because of the lethargy and laziness of the bishops . . . | would like to see this custom restored, if not completely, at least to some degree and returned to its original form by the bishop whom we are teaching.”"” Yet by the century’s end, as we shall see, bishops and their vicars and curates had shown that they too could be highly effective and influential preachers, though in a different context from mendicants. These changes demonstrate the first results of half a century of internal efforts at reform, codified and given backbone at the Council of Trent. The impetus behind this shift was the increased pressure in the sixteenth century for bishops to return to their dioceses and to implement consistently the preaching that they had long ignored. This is a second reason to study sermons; changes in preaching practice reflect broader shifts such as this in religious life. The movement to have bishops live, preach, and govern in their dioceses began in the early part of the sixteenth century. At the Fifth Lateran Council, convened in 1512, Pope Julius II and his councilors tried for the first time to

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address the abuses within the Church and admitted that preaching practice needed reform. Their diligence was driven in large part by fear of the recent activities of Italy’s best known preacher, Girolamo Savonarola, whose apocalyptic prophecies and ardent followers threatened the social and political order in Florence in the 1ry9os.’’ The ninth session of the council (December 19, 1516), held when Savonarola’s execution was in living memory and his

publications still in wide circulation, tried to stem the tide of apocalyptic preaching. The participants argued that it was impertinent to the Church and the pope when such preachers inveighed against clerical abuses, and that

it was dangerous for an uneducated and credulous laity to listen to them. “Perverting the multiple sense of Holy Scripture . . . [they] preach terrors, threats, imminent catastrophes . . . daring to affirm that they speak through the inspiration and impulse of the Holy Ghost . . . so that simple people, who are the most disposed to be tricked, easily turn to many errors.”

If more people were exposed more regularly to orthodox sermons, argued the council fathers, they would be less easily led astray. Consistent preaching could only take place if bishops lived in their appointed dioceses and supervised the sermons. It is important to remember how rarely, in that era, bishops were involved in pastoral work or even seen as pastoral figures. The Council of Trent finally determined that episcopal residence and frequent preaching were a divine requirement, and some of the delegates who took this position are featured in this study. The preaching of reforming bishops targeted rural parishes, poor city dwellers, and, in general, people who might never before have received a systematic catechetical education. This kind of preaching was very much a product of Catholic reform, and its goal was to make sure that everybody knew at least the rudiments of faith. It thus tended toward straightforward

explanation and clarification of doctrine. As a result, a new population of untrained preachers arose over the course of the sixteenth century: local curates and priests newly expected to preach regularly to an uneducated laity. At the same time, members of monastic orders continued to preach pub-

licly around the country, as they had since the Middle Ages. They no longer held as much of a monopoly on preaching, but they remained the country’s most celebrated preachers, who preached to the public and also to private, more elite audiences. City councils still invited them for the great sermon

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cycles of Lent and Advent. These men remained among the most prized celebrities of their day—sought after across the peninsula, brought by special request to the most elite churches in Rome, and sometimes sent to represent Catholicism in increasingly tense religious confrontations with Protestants. Their high status and their familiarity with the decision-making bodies of the Church made them spokesmen for the Church and conveyers of orthodoxy to the lay faithful. Their sermons were not only delivered but

published and republished. What they taught their audiences is what the Church wanted audiences to know.

Rhetoric and Rhetorical Guides These two populations of preachers, mendicants and bishops, naturally employed radically different rhetorical styles, reflecting their different audiences or different levels of education. Mendicants gave long, elaborate, and literary orations; bishops and their staff gave simple, straightforward talks.

The formal, public sermons of mendicants can be termed “oratorical” or “elite” or simply “mendicant” preaching as opposed to the more pedagogical “episcopal” or “diocesan” preaching. The sermons of Cornelio Musso, the most prolific mendicant preacher after Savonarola, embody the mendicant style of the sixteenth century. This had evolved away from the medieval sermo modernus or thematic sermon, which in turn was a move away from the simpler homily of the patristic era. The sermo modernus followed a precise formula and relied on biblical and

patristic proof texts grouped into categories and subcategories. Although such sermons could be animated and even humorous, their fundamental goal emphasized docere (teaching) over the other two traditional classical goals of rhetoric: movere and delectare (moving and delighting). Its hyperarticulated structure reflected the scholastic training of its mendicant practi-

tioners. From the late fourteenth century, humanist attention to classical rhetoric and its three genres—deliberative, demonstrative, and judicial—led to a shift in both oratorical styles and goals. Preachers increasingly emphasized the goal of delectare, delighting listeners, over docere, teaching them, as

they took up the classical genus demonstrativum, which transformed the sermon ‘from an exercise in proof and dialectical argumentation to an exer-

cise in praise.”° In exchanging medieval terminology and idioms for classical ones, preachers changed the content and goals of preaching. The

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new sermon style both encouraged the early Renaissance motif of the “dignity of man” and, by the early seventeenth century, contributed to Rome’s— and the papacy’s—vision of itself as a model of a holy, radiant, and fully reformed Christian community. These changes in genre took place primarily at the most elite levels; its most extensive documentation comes from sermons given in Latin at the papal court. But the growth of humanist studies also encouraged the development of the literary vernacular, and soon enough, vernacular sermons, often given by the same preachers, quickly came to imitate their Latin counterparts. With a new grounding in classical literature and a growing standardization of the Italian language, vernacular sermons could appeal across regions and social classes and become suitable for elite audiences. By the sixteenth century, vernacular sermons were considered capable of fulfilling all the goals of classical oratory, again oriented toward the demonstrative, or epideictic, genre; they were lavish and ornate, with the goal of delighting the listener. By the late sixteenth century, mendicant preaching had traveled so far from its homiletical origins that it was seen as more literary than pedagogical. The developing Italian literary canon made room for a special genre of “sacred oratory,” of which Musso has been called the earliest prac-

titioner. The emphasis on affect and emotion continued to characterize Catholic preaching and distinguish it from Protestant varieties well into the seventeenth century.’’ Tommaso Porcacchi and Francesco Sansovino, both literary men, published anthologies of sermons because they saw them as an indispensable part of rhetoric and vernacular literature in general.”* Musso’s sermons are stylistically formal, with a proem and three or four

divisions. They cover a wide range of topics, from divine love to the supremacy of Peter, and could stray far from the prescribed pericope, or scriptural excerpt, for the day. Musso shows a taste for elaborate metaphors, long digressions, and copious quotations. His primary sermon collection, for example, opens with the sermon that marked his entrance into Bitonto as its bishop, and its first words compare “a great field full of lovely sweetsmelling flowers, [in which] it is very difficult to identify, in one glance, the most beautiful one of all,” to “the Christian religion, which embraces only the good and beautiful aspects dispersed among other laws; it is not at all easy to judge immediately and decide which virtue best deserves the palm, the greatest praise, the biggest prize.”’” Musso used his skills to compose elaborate exhortations to better Christian behavior. In a sermon on “Christ

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the Shepherd,” given in Rome soon after Easter in 1539, he described the problems with absentee bishops and with the lost sheep, their abandoned flocks.*® He excoriated bishops for not attending to their duties, but when he imagined what would happen when bishops did as they ought, he turned to poetic repetition: You will help the poor, liberate the oppressed, reward the good;

you will even tolerate sinners up to a point, then you will chide them like a father, you will make them see their errors; you will love everyone; you will embrace everyone, you will send nobody away from your bosom; you will admonish the angry; reconcile the litigious; protect the poor from violence; console the cow-

ards; support the weak; tame the contumacious; teach those who do not know; arouse the lazy; reign in the haughty; humiliate the contentious; mortify the insolent.”’

Like many mendicant preachers, Musso moved easily between teaching and

declaiming, blending pedagogical or moral messages with elaborate rhythms, repetitions, and alliteration. He did not shy away from preaching the vices and virtues that were his Franciscan heritage and that he would bring to bear on the deliberations at Trent about preaching.” The most elusive aspects of these celebrated sermons are visual and physical: We can know the words the preacher spoke, but we can rarely reconstruct his carefully honed gestures, intonation, and speech patterns.” Yet these were crucial to his success in the pulpit, especially before a large crowd who could see farther than they could hear.** Gesturing typically meant deploying props such as crucifixes and the careful placement of the hands—extended out, placed on the heart, or pointing upward, as the text dictated—but it could veer into melodrama. Medieval preachers might stretch their arms in imitation of the cross and stay in position for half an hour. They might hold their noses, feign playing a trumpet, assume a fetal position, wear dramatic costumes or remove parts of their clothes, sing, spit, groan, or cry. It is no surprise that medieval preaching guides insisted over and over on restraint.”

Physical performance remained important throughout the rise in stylistic rhetoric during the sixteenth century. Preachers’ guides routinely

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WHERE SERMONS MATTERED

addressed gesture and intonation along with composition. Luca Baglione devoted a section to each in his Larte del predicare of 1562, exalting the

preacher by drawing advice from the classical orators Cicero and Demosthenes. With gestures, he insisted, less was more, for they signaled the preacher’s modesty and saintliness as well as his skill. Preaching guides argued that too much drama led easily to ridicule. Francesco Panigarola’s Il Predicatore mocked preachers who deployed sensational gambits such as hammering on an anvil to evoke the act of crucifixion: “We have certainly never done this: nor have we found it anywhere in our studies from which we could conjecture that the Holy Fathers ever did it either.”*° Serafino Razzi

closed his instructions to preachers by reminding them to keep their arms folded in their sleeves until they ascended the pulpit and spoke their introduction, for the sake of majesty and gravitas. Only then, and only with “few and appropriate” gestures, should they draw out their hands and proceed to the rest of the sermon.”

Intonation was arguably even more important than it had been in the Middle Ages, for it marked the greatest difference between the printed page

and the spoken word. Timoteo Buonamici, Razzi’s acolyte, justified the printing of sermons precisely because the printed text could not capture the “live voice, external actions, and the spirit of the preacher.’** Panigarola, like the Spanish Dominican Luis de Granada, who was widely popular in Italy, reinforced the medieval emphasis on variation in tone, volume, and emphasis, again urging that dramatics be reserved for critical moments. Reading word for word was the mark of the untrained preacher too dependent on the text, especially the texts of others.*” These repeated pleas for moderation suggest,

nonetheless, that mendicant preachers still tended toward excess in their delivery. A preoccupation with practiced gesture and tone remained a hallmark of Catholic preaching into the seventeenth century.””

In this era, the older, humbler, and simpler homily also had its own renaissance in the vernacular, both in Catholic Italy and in Protestant circles elsewhere.’ This sermon style originated in the patristic era and had retained some popularity throughout the Middle Ages alongside the newer sermo modernus. The homily was a running commentary on a passage of scripture,

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often with little other structure. A growing interest in original sources, and thus in the direct meaning of scriptural passages, contributed to this revival; so too did the need for clear explanations in a time of growing doctrinal confusion. Diocesan preachers with less classical training could profit from this revival and make use of the homily genre as they developed simpler sermons for a humbler audience.’* The sermons of Pope Gregory the Great, translated into Italian and reprinted at least three times in this era (1502, 1505, and 1543),

embody the homiletic style. Gregory’s homily for the fourth Sunday of Advent opens with no metaphor or elaborate comparison, but with only a brief introduction of the pericope. He begins, “This lesson demonstrates the era in which the precursor of our Redeemer received the word of preaching by naming the prince of the Roman Republic and the king of the Jews,” and it goes immediately on to quote the pericope, Luke 3:1: “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee. .. .”*? In this way, the revival of the homily and of the diocesan preacher returned preaching to its earliest origins. The best near-contemporary examples of homiletic sermons were those of Ludovico (or Luigi Bigi) Pittorio, a member of illustrious literary and noble

circles in Ferrara and a student of the notable humanist teacher Battista Guarino. Pittorio’s published work, from early in the century, includes a volume of exegetical homilies linked to the Lenten cycle, as well as a lectionary and similar volumes on psalms.** Pittorio’s homilies are direct and conversational. They move from the scriptural reading for the day, presented verse by verse in abbreviated vernacular paraphrases, to a direct and emotional exhortation to penitence and charitable living, as befits the Lenten season. They include no patristic or scholastic references, and they have none of the classical rhetorical flourishes that one might have expected, given Pittorio’s classical training. His openings are straightforward and set the tone for the entire sermon: “Appropriately, in the first of Lent, season of penitence, does God exhort us through the mouth of his prophet Joel to convert ourselves to him: Convertimini ad me, convert yourselves to me... And in what way does God want us to convert to him?” Introductions such as these lost no time in bringing readers directly to the scrutiny of scriptural passages. The astonishing publication rate of Pittorio’s Homilarium throughout the century—it was reissued regularly, more than thirty-five separate times, between 1506 and 1599—shows the enduring appeal of sermons, especially homilies, as a written genre. Pittorio makes this point explicitly by including

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in his lectionary some works composed purely for the spiritual benefit of the sermon form: “So as not to be at all remiss in doing things useful and healthy for my dear readers, and knowing that in the pilgrimage from this present

life confession, compunction, and communion are necessary for the true Christian .. . I thought to have printed at the end of this book of ours four written sermons.””°

The Homilarium alone made Pittorio one of the most-printed sermon authors of the century (see Appendix), yet he was not a preacher, or even a cleric; he was a layperson—a secular poet and epigrammatist with classical training and a penitential streak, who wrote of a religious experience in his thirties and devoted his life thereafter to devotional texts.’ Pittorio’s lay status might have given his works a special everyman’s appeal, but it also suggests, perhaps, a voracious appetite for devotional, comprehensible printed sermons, and a potential market for more and better-fitting examples.

Thus in the sixteenth century, two parallel preaching genres developed, split more or less along class lines. The two genres were often seen as wholly different, even unrelated, activities. Preaching guides, sermon anthologies,

and individual authors, when they discussed preaching, referred either to ornate sermons by mendicant orators, or to the homilies of secular clerics, but never both. In 1562 Luca Baglioni published his guide for novice mendicant preachers. Baglione was an Observant Franciscan, and he dedicated his work to the superior of his order, because he had heard him preach at the Council of Trent. Baglioni compared preachers to classical orators and dwelt

on the rhetorical principles and Greek authors he thought they should master. The same year, the curate Giovanni Del Bene also produced a guide for new preachers, but in a diocesan context. His book of sermons, he wrote, should be given to curates to read or draw from during Mass. Like the homilies of Pope Gregory the Great, they paraphrase and explain gospel passages line by line, according to the liturgical year.’* Neither of these authors considers the questions that interest the other. This development by no means implies that Italy had a social system or a religious culture that fell into separate (and simplistic) categories of “elite”

and “popular.” The categories describe the formation and context of the preachers, not the audience. In reality, preachers could switch genres, and

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sermons were preached to mixed audiences more often than not. Different social groups not only had amorphous borders, but could appropriate the same text in different ways.” I emphasize the distinction between the two

preaching genres in order to point out that the term “preaching,” which to us has one general meaning, referred to two separate activities in the sixteenth century. Modern scholars continue to reinforce this dichotomy, distinguishing “professional, itinerant” preachers, for example, from “the humble curator of souls who—out of institutional duty sanctioned by Trent—is designated to deliver homilies to his own flock on feast days." As with all categorizations, that which distinguishes diocesan from mendicant preachers is imperfect. But in describing the broad contours in Italian preaching, it is helpful to honor those categories by treating preachers in their particular groups. To do so highlights each of their evolutions in the sixteenth century.

Sermons in Print Almost no living preachers in Italy saw their sermons into print before the

middle of the sixteenth century; readers of sermon volumes turned to authors of earlier generations: Savonarola, Pittorio, or the fifteenth-century Franciscan Roberto Caracciolo. The 1540s saw the beginning of a dramatic surge, both in sermon publication in general and in works by contemporary preachers. Sermon production rose sharply in the years surrounding the opening of the Council of Trent and continued to rise thereafter (Figure 1). Vernacular religious printing on the whole increased even more in the postTridentine period. Its growth from that point can be attributed in part to a developing consensus about Italy’s Catholic future and also to printers’ profitable adaptations to this new religious climate.*! In France, a similar situation held: few Catholic (or Protestant) sermons were published between 1530 and 1560, in large part because the market was glutted with previously printed sermons and because live preaching was considered a better weapon against heresy, given the fluid and uncertain political and religious situation. After 1560, Calvinism became more of a central threat and led to anincrease in published sermon rates among Catholics.” Yet in Italy, all genres of sermon literature, though they reflected the same leap in the 1570s, started to increase decades earlier. In content, as the following chapters will show, the sermons published before the end of the Council

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addressed contentious, unresolved issues. Preachers used the press in order to seek, not reflect, resolutions to problems of reform. Although both Italian and Latin sermon publication rose in the latter part of the century, Italian sermons consistently and increasingly outstripped Latin, reflecting the development of the literary vernacular and perhaps the growing social importance given to preaching in general (Figure 2). The turn to vernacular sermons also suggests the growing need to equip and train new diocesan preachers. The increase in sermon literature held true both for mendicant and diocesan or homiletical styles of preaching. Further investigation shows even that when episcopal reform was difficult to implement, it nonetheless prompted a new genre of preaching literature: Because so few of these secular clerics had any experience or training in

180 160 140

8 120 2 S 100

E 80

S 60 40 20 0

SOoOFrFr andtanatyty BH SEERKR & BS DB

ee eee ese Pee eere ree eee ee Year of Publication

Figure 1 General trends in sixteenth-century Italian sermon literature Source: Edit16/USTC, accessed May 2010. These charts are intended to give a sense

of general directions in printing and should not be taken as final or completely definitive. Each year on the x-axis represents five years of cumulative production: the 1535 point, for example, shows sermon literature from 1535-1539. Sermon literature is determined by the following key words, which were checked manually for duplicates and for unrelated works, especially medical and grammatical texts: —TItalian sermon books: prediche, sermoni, homelie, omelie, discorsi, quadragesimali, predicabili. —TItalian single sermons: predica, sermone, homelia, omelia. —Latin sermon books: sermones, conciones, quadragesimales. —Latin single sermons: sermo, concio, contio.

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delivering sermons, the more conscientious bishops ordered the production of treatises, manuals, and books of model sermons designed to help them earn. The middle years of the century thus saw a change in the nature—an

l The middle y fth tury th hange in the nat d a sharp increase in the number—of works specifically devoted to the sorts of sermons that would serve a diocesan preacher (Figure 3). Published vernacular sermons therefore form a large proportion of early modern religious literature. What no publication data can capture, it must e remembered, are the many more sermons that have not survived—those that were not recorded, or were recorded in manuscript but not printed, or were printed but not in a lasting format, or were printed in a lasting format but subject to later destruction. The majority of sermons that do survive from the mid-sixteenth century were prepared by preachers editing collections of their own texts in the hope

b bered th y that h t d—th

of broadening their audience.” From our perspective, a sermon preached long ago is now inextricable from its published form, but they were closely related in the early modern world as well. If the latter did not substitute for the former, it supplemented it. Laypeople in confraternities were encouraged to write down the sermons they heard in order to transform them into

Piety: yeq 90 Italian a Bg, It py yi

books of piety for their own use or those of others; these found ready equivalents in popular printed form. Ludovico Pittorio, in 1546, told his public that

a reader should read the relevant entry in a sermon volume for each feast

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Figure 2 Italian and Latin sermon literature Source: Editi6/USTC accessed May 2010

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aeyNf WHERE SERMONS MATTERED

day before going to church or upon returning, so that the spiritual benefit would accrue “both in reading, and in hearing it, or after having heard it.” Sermons could travel farther in print than their authors did in person, to reach people in regions where preachers had not ventured. Through a printed sermon in any form, a solitary reader could find a sense of community and feel himself part of the original preached event. Printed sermons could reach more people over more time than a preached sermon could; in addition, they bore the approval both of censors and of the reading, book-purchasing public. While scholars have devoted much attention to the words of controversial or heterodox preachers, few of their actual sermons survived.” The majority of printed sermons easily available for sale in the sixteenth century and for consultation today, in contrast, are an excellent indicator of the positions that would eventually be considered Catholic orthodoxy. They are part of the laity’s increasing demand not only for new ideas, but for religious involvement. The egalitarian aspects of printed books, which brought written texts to many more people, accompanied a growing participatory impulse in religious life, less and less the preserve of monastic orders.*° As clergy sought to accommodate these changes, printed sermons responded to both.

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Source: Edit16/USTC accessed May 2010. Keywords for this query were “homelie” and

“omelie”. The related term “discorsi” is also used in many other contexts and was therefore not included.

[| 31 |

THE PULPIT AND THE PRESS IN REFORMATION ITALY

*** It can be difficult to decide what distinguishes a preacher from a cleric who gives the occasional sermon, just as today it is difficult to distinguish a professional public speaker from an expert who earns honoraria for occasional lectures in her field. Clergymen in the early modern world could hold many

simultaneous offices and perform many functions, and preaching was almost always among them. Publication could make the difference; going to the effort to prepare the volume could be on occasion the act that changed a person from someone who gives sermons into a preacher. Once printed, sermons reached more than one audience. An expensive collection might appeal to another preacher who would use it for inspiration

or direct plagiarism in his own preaching. A cardinal trying to build an impressive religious library or a well-off monk who wanted to consult the scholarly marginalia might also want to purchase it. Such collections could equally appeal to literate and educated laypeople: not only the cardinal but his wealthy brother or the tutor to his sons, the religiously minded diplomat, or the newly rich silk merchant wanting to prove his piety and property—all

these sorts of laypeople who might want to own a book of sermons and could afford it.*’

Furthermore, published sermons, like many books, were as likely to be read aloud as silently, and often in groups, thus recreating some of the sermons’ original audible drama. The silk merchant’s wife and the woman who helped her with spinning; the youngest daughter who still lived at home and

the suitor apprenticed to her father—all might hear a sermon as part of family devotional reading. The written or printed word could have influence among people who could not read it. Books and reading had a trickledown effect; the border between oral and written culture was porous.*® But how do we know that a printed sermon had ever been preached at all? Sermons revised for publication after delivery were typically prettied up; stripped of jokes, colloquialisms, and local references; and refitted with biblical and other Latin quotations. The level of rhetoric could be raised, and complicated subjects could be explained in greater depth. Rarely did a complete and accurate transcript of a sermon exist before publication, since a preacher usually spoke extemporaneously from notes and did not read his

[| 32 |

WHERE SERMONS MATTERED

sermons word for word.” In Musso’s published sermons, scriptural citations noted throughout the margins demonstrate the care and revision that went

into preparation before print. The sermons could easily run up to eighty pages each in the large quarto format, an improbably long transcription of even a feast day sermon. The four decades that elapsed between the start of Musso’s career in the 1530s and the publication of his compendium saw the establishment of ever stricter standards of censorship. Scholars must there-

fore take all printed sermons with a grain of salt, and be alert to possible anachronisms—especially in the most extreme cases, such as the sermon that Musso supposedly delivered in 1530 as a nineteen-year-old student in Padua, nearly fifty years before publishing it. Nonetheless, published sermons bear clear marks of their oratorical ori-

gins, through details in the titles of sermons and in the texts themselves. Every sermon in Musso’s largest collection is printed with the year and city in which it was given, and often with the name of the church, the specific date, and further details. A typical sermon title in this volume is the sixth sermon in volume II: Sermon on the Primacy of St. Peter, Given in Rome, in the Church of San Lorenzo in Damaso, the First Saturday of Lent, which was the Twenty-Second of February, 1545. Similarly, a sermon title from volume IV

notes the presence of the Duchess of Milan in the cathedral of Pavia.’® Topical details in the sermons themselves also contribute evidence, such as Musso’s thanks, as he began the third part of one sermon, that the heavy rain had begun to let up, and that he no longer had to shout to be heard.’ All these details make it plausible that the sermon published is at least an approximate record of a sermon preached.” Musso himself was aware of these difficulties. In the preface to his second volume of sermons, he explained his choice of Italian over Latin by pointing out that he had published them “more or less as they were spoken.” In the preface to the third volume, Musso wrote that he was tempted to alter his sermons before publishing them and only refrained for fear of being chided by people who had heard the original versions. As a result, he published the sermons “not quite as naked as they were born, but not especially embellished either,” even though they might not flatter him.’ This passage is not fully reassuring, because it shows that Musso did revisit his sermons before

publishing them, but it also demonstrates his commitment to accuracy. Musso carefully supervised the publication of all of his sermons, editing

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THE PULPIT AND THE PRESS IN REFORMATION ITALY

many volumes himself and protesting vehemently, for example, at an item listed poorly in the table of contents of one of his sermon collections. He wrote to both his editor and his publisher that it did not accurately reflect his ideas or his sermon.”* Franceschino Visdomini, a contemporary of Musso, also made energetic use of the press, clearly believing that a sermon could double its usefulness with a second life in print. But his published sermons avoided some of the problems of retouching. Where other great preachers produced long, multivolume collections of pericopic sermons for the liturgical year and published their collected works near the end of their lives or posthumously, Visdomini did not take this route. His published sermons were almost never linked to the traditional preaching cycles of Lent and Advent. Instead, he published many sermons singly, or in small collections, soon after their delivery, particularly if

the sermons had commemorated a special event or were part of a visit to another city. A typical example is The Comfort of Death for a Good Christian, Preached...in Genoa... on the Fifth of May, 1553, which was published singly

in Venice in the same year.” The relatively rapid rate of publication gave Visdomini little time to revise his sermons in detail. The printed versions are therefore more likely to reflect his actual words in the pulpit and less likely to have been altered to conform to later standards. Visdomini was most active during the three decades of the Council of Trent. Many of his works and most of his singly published sermons were printed in the 1550s, before the Council closed in 1563. Because he wrote and published so many sermons between the Council's first and last session, Visdomini's preaching better reveals the kinds of teaching that reached the public during this period of flux. Printing was always a collaboration among authors, printers, and others;

between the composition of the sermon’s text and its arrival on a reader's lectern, many hands changed it. Mendicant preachers tended to develop relationships with established, highly regarded preachers. Musso published primarily with Gabriele Giolito and the Giunti family; Franceschino Visdomini worked with Andrea Arrivabene.”° Yet the same printers could also publish humbler works: Francesco Senese published both Gabriele Fiamma’s mendicant prediche and his more modest discorsi for beginning diocesan preachers.

Arrivabene published Del Bene’s Sermoni ovvero Homelie for diocesan preachers, but so did five other printers, including Giorgio de’ Cavalli, printer of the famed anthologizer and letterato Tommaso Porcacchi.

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WHERE SERMONS MATTERED

Finally, printing sermons was always also an act of strategy and marketing. Possibly the most prescient words that the preacher Cornelio Musso ever wrote were these: “By putting [these books] in print, they may produce some fruit for the glory of God.” Although he was the star preacher of his generation, it was his deliberate use of the press that enabled his listeners to revisit his words and brought them to broader audiences. And while we rarely find material that shows us enough about how sermons were read, looking

closely at how they were published reveals the hope that preachers and printers harbored for them.’* A sample of Musso’s publications alone shows us

the editorial strategies that marketed sermons for different audiences. The smallest and cheapest technique was to print a quick pamphlet, like

the 1546 publication of Musso’s most famous sermon, preached at Trent against the Lutherans to commemorate Charles V’s campaign against the Schmalkaldic League.”? The pamphlet is two simple gatherings quickly stitched together, with no cover. The title page bears only the title, subject, and author, and no information about the publisher (Figure 4). It includes the barest of illustrations: a repurposed woodcut in sorry shape, with broken or missing borders. This sort of treatment—small, quick, and cheap—had been traditional for sermon publication since at least the 1480s and was typically used to disseminate the Latin sermons delivered at the papal court to a wider audience. In fact, the woodcut on the title page in Figure 4 shows a preacher speaking from a pulpit to a seated pope, surrounded by solicitous cardinals and some armed laypeople; it bears no resemblance to the context of Musso’s sermon and had probably been used dozens of times before. The publishers, Valerio and Luigi Dorico, in Rome, printed much official material for the Church.°’ Despite the relative shabbiness of this publication, they tended to

publish material at the upper end of the literary spectrum. On the other hand, three other printers also made this sermon into a pamphlet, so clearly it was a safe bet. Pamphlets like this were easily affordable and intended for a wide audience; their small size, cheap production, and quick turnaround made them objects to be read and used, not prized. Whereas most larger books had a first print run of about a thousand copies, a very popular pamphlet could see double or triple that; then again, it is impossible to know how many copies of a pamphlet have since been lost.° Slightly up the economic scale came pamphlets such as Musso’s 1553

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Figure 4 Musso’ sermon in Trent, 1546 pamphlet Source: The Newberry Library

WHERE SERMONS MATTERED

sermon on justification and the remission of sin, given in Padua—still published singly and inexpensive to produce, but of higher, more booklike, quality.°* The topic was polemical, which is probably why it merited immediate publication. This pamphlet has a complete title page, with a lengthier, more descriptive title and a printer’s mark. Internal sections are set off with woodcut initials of classical scenes.°? The pamphlet is bound loosely in

vellum, and an early owner has scrawled a couplet on the cover about chasing away the devil. The sermon itself comes heralded by a proemio anda

dedication from the printer—not the author—to his patron, the wealthy nobleman Luigi Cornaro (Figure 5). Preachers were immensely admired; their sermons, written down, could claim near-universal usefulness and popularity. They were a likely seller. Yet to publish a sermon volume in the mid-sixteenth century seems to have been an ambivalent task. In a time of doctrinal flux and increasing standards of censorship, it was more risky to publish a living preacher than a safely orthodox dead one like Roberto Carracciolo or even Girolamo Savonarola,

both of whose sermons saw dozens of reprints in the sixteenth century.” Perhaps for both these reasons, printers, like preachers, took special care with their sermon volumes, and with surprising frequency for the period, explained in print what they were trying to do. The printing techniques and the paratexts—such as the dedication letter, tables of contents, and supporting material—reveal that each publication was a complex negotiation in which the status of the printer, the preacher, the dedicatees, and the readers all hung in the balance. Andrea Arrivabene’s dedication in his pamphlet publication of Musso’s sermon is an unusually frank look at a printer’s calculations of risk and at an author's potential involvement in printing. Arrivabene began his letter with hyperbolic praise for Musso, calculated to appease the preacher from the outset. He described Musso’s great fame and the moment, on the Octave of Easter, when Musso delivered the sermon in Padua to a crowd that overflowed the church. Musso seemed divine and miraculous that day, gushed Arrivabene,

not only in comparison with other preachers, but even compared to himself at other times. Arrivabene insisted that he was so moved by the sermon that he determined to publish it without sponsorship and even without Musso’s knowledge. He hesitated for a few days, fearing that Musso would scorn him and refuse to work with him or with other printers again. Only the thought of

| 37 |

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importance, it might have a full-page woodcut with floral borders preceding every sermon, as Giolito’s 1580 edition of the third volume of Musso’s collected sermons did (Figure 6). Yet the woodcuts might be recycled from a book of hours or a missal, with only general regard to their placement in the new volume.®® In that 1580 volume, a picture of Saints Peter and Paul at the foot of the cross precedes not only the sermon for Ascension Day but also the sermon on the Good Samaritan. A pieta showing the dead Christ in the arms of a pope accompanies, with varying ink quality, sermons on Christ’s death, on the Resurrection, an Easter sermon, and another on Christian reli-

gion. This is a collection intended for frequent and practical use, which in this case, it seems to have received: Although the volume came with an extensive table of topics, a contemporary hand has added the titles and page numbers of each sermon on the flyleaf for immediate reference. An earlier octavo version of Musso’s sermons, also by Giolito, is much more elegant; its juxtaposition with the 1580 volume shows how Géiolito actively sought different markets for his author and defended his own reputation as a fine printer.® Giolito had everything riding on this volume, so much that he wrote a special letter to readers to explain the stakes. Earlier, he explained, he had published an elaborate edition of this collection in the larger quarto format that was used for scholarly and patristic literature.’” He had then granted other printers the right to reprint the sermons in the more popular octavo format, but was dismayed to see that what a poor job they had done. The spelling was off, the type quality was poor, and Musso’s careful wording had been altered. Giolito decided to show his colleagues how a book by such an illustrious preacher ought to look. He warned his readers that even if unscrupulous printers had usurped his printer’s mark, the phoenix, a careful reader would recognize the higher quality of his own work. As a result, the 1556 edition of occasional sermons is as beautifully presented as a sermon volume could be (Figure 7).”* Despite its small size, the book has biblical citations throughout the margins, keyed to Musso’s text. Giolito pointed out that Musso had specifically requested the glossing; preacher and printer had clearly collaborated on the need for the volume to meet high standards. The woodcut initials in the paratext are carefully chosen to reflect scenes from the Passion. The typeface throughout is a wellproportioned cursive. Figure 7 shows not the title page, but the internal page beginning Musso’s sermon against Lutherans. This is the same sermon

| 41 |

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IN TRENT OQ, YOTTAVA DELVASSENSIONE DELLA VERGINE, LANNO XLVI. PER LIMPRESA DI CESARE CARLO Quintocontra Lutherani,

NELLA QVALE SI TRATTA DELLE PERSECVTIONI, ET delle Vittorie della Santa Chiefa.

DEVS -NOSTER, REF VGCIFM, ex mirtus , adintor in tribulationibus ,

gue Injlenerunt nos nimts.