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Mary's Mother: Saint Anne in Late Medieval Europe (review)

266 organization. The construction of these large edifices often occurred with financial support from the communes, who also redirected charity toward the friars and their activities. It is well known that the mendicants assumed pastoral roles traditionally fulfilled by parish clergy ranging from saying masses to confession and burial, but they also held sensitive positions in communal government (a topic now being studied by Frances Andrews). Thompson intriguingly suggests that the mendicant takeover of communal religion had the unintentional effect of creating new spaces for women in spiritual life, in comparison with the earlier neighborhood societies, which were primarily male. However, the most significant impact came in the monitoring of orthodoxy and growth of the office of the Inquisition. Thompson illustrates the conflict between a lay piety that understood religious faith as neighborliness and acts of Christian belief, and that of the friars who insisted upon doctrinal correctness. This clash marked the end, or at least the transition, of communal religious culture. In sum, Thompson makes a convincing case that “at no time was the commune secular in the modern sense” (136). Cities of God contributes a different perspective on the medieval communes and, indeed, of the Italian Church. His ideas about civic culture as lived religion provide an intriguing contrast to Robert Brentano’s classic and still influential study, Two Churches: England and Italy in the Thirteenth Century (originally published by Princeton in 1968 and reprinted by California with an additional essay in 1988). The publisher has cast the book as “bold, revisionist history,” but it strikes me not as much a challenge to this more administrative view of Italian religious history as the profitable outcome of looking at new sources with different questions in mind. To some extent, Cities of God will seem a more traditional book, harkening back to an older view of the medieval period as the Christian Middle Ages. But Thompson’s work is not simply apologetics and his vivid examples convey the complexity of communal religion. Research by both Richard Trexler and Edward Muir on civic ritual in Renaissance Italy is an obvious influence, but this study proposes a major methodological shift in terms of using the liturgy to gain access to how medieval people understood what it meant to be Christians. Thompson has opened new avenues for research on penitential groups and indeed the transformation of communal religion in the fourteenth century. Scholars of medieval Italy are already debating his characterizations. Specialists in other areas also will learn from his study and perhaps suggest ways in which the religion of the medieval Italian communes is not simply a unique case.