Mormando's (Italian/Boston Coll.) survey of the 40-year preaching
career of the Franciscan friar and Catholic saint Bernardino of
Siena (1380-1444) is one of only a few book-length studies on this
mouthpiece of medieval obscurantism. This book further dismantles
the view of the early Italian Renaissance as an enlightened period,
exposing the fundamental fears and insecurities of the Quattrocento
(feminine magical power, paganism, the body and sexuality, and
Christianity's inherent limitations) through the prism of
Bernardino's sermons dealing with witchcraft, sodomites, and Jews.
The friar's passionate call to denounce witches and burn them at
the stake rests upon folklore beliefs that attribute to witches a
number of grave sins, including infanticide, blood-sucking, and
even fornication with the Devil. Bernardino was just as adamant
about eradicating sodomy, by which he understood any sexual
activity not leading to procreation. Passing on to Bernardino's
third scapegoat, the Jews, Mormando runs into a problem. While he
seeks to downplay somewhat the saint's notorious anti-Semitism, he
advances unconvincing evidence. Indeed, the friar emerges here as a
dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semite, who repeatedly referred to the Jews
as the chief enemies of Christianity and proscribed any social or
business contact between them and his followers. He also spoke in
favor of isolating the Jews and ordering them to wear
distinguishing badges. As for Bernardino's occasional adjurations
to "love the Jew with a general love," this was no more than lip
service to an abstract principle of brotherly love and cannot
'attenuate his responsibility for spreading hostility toward Jews.
Unfortunately, Mormando paints his picture of the Quattrocento
exclusively though this preacher's eyes, without presenting the
popular reaction to his message. Contrary to the book's professed
goal, we learn more about the anxieties of Bernardino's tormented
psyche and the intolerant streak in Catholicism than about the
social underworld of early Renaissance Italy. (Kirkus Reviews)
"When the city was filled with these bonfires, he then combed the
city, and whenever he received notice of some public sodomite, he
had him immediately seized and thrown into the nearest bonfire at
hand and had him burned immediately." This story, of an anonymous
individual who sought to cleanse medieval Paris, was part of a
sermon delivered in Siena, Italy, in 1427. The speaker, the friar
Bernardino (1380-1444), was one of the most important public
figures of the time, and he spent forty years combing the towns of
Italy, instructing, admonishing, and entertaining the crowds that
gathered in prodigious numbers to hear his sermons.
His story of the Parisian vigilante was a "recommendation." Sexual
deviants were the objects of relentless, unconditional persecution
in Bernardino's sermons. Other targets of the preacher's venom were
witches, Jews, and heretics. Mormando takes us into the social
underworld of early Renaissance Italy to discover how one
enormously influential figure helped to dramatically increase fear,
hatred, and intolerance for those on society's margins.
This book is the first on Bernardino to appear in thirty-five
years, and the first ever to consider the preacher's inflammatory
role in Renaissance social issues.
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