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The Cult of Remembrance and the Black Death: Six Renaissance Cities in Central Italy
A comparative study of six Italian city-states―Arezzo, Florence, Perugia, Assisi, Pisa, and Siena―shows the rise of a new Renaissance cult of remembrance. Selected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title In 1363 the Black Death struck central Italy for the second time, causing a detectable shift in notions of the afterlife and patterns of charitable giving. Throughout Tuscany and Umbria, patricians and peasants alike abandoned their previous practice of dividing bequests into small sums, combining them instead into last gifts to enhance their "fame and glory" and that of their lineages. Illustrative of the new mentality, religious art patronage spread to new social classes, touching even peasants, who sought to be represented "in their very likeness" at the feet of their patron saints. From the supposed center of Renaissance culture―Florence―to the citadel of Franciscan devotion―Assisi―this change in sentiment spurred new levels of demand for monumental burials, testamentary commissions for art, and other efforts to exert control over the living from the grave. In his award-winning study, Death and Property in Siena , historian Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., used close analysis of last wills to chart transformations in mentalities over a six-hundred-year history. In The Cult of Remembrance and the Black Death , he applies the same methods to compare six Italian city-states―Arezzo, Florence, Perugia, Assisi, Pisa, and Siena―showing the rise of a new Renaissance cult of remembrance. But this new cult was not Burckhardt's Renaissance "individualism" tout court . Instead, the new piety grew in tandem with reverence for the ancestors and a strong sense of family identity that flowed down male blood lines.
448 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1992
About the author
Samuel K. Cohn Jr.
20 books12 followersSamuel Kline Cohn Jr., is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Glasgow.
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October 25, 2013
Next week Showtime is airing a show called
Time of Death
, a documentary that explores how people come to terms with death as well as how, as a society its something we rarely talk about or deal with directly. As James Poniewozik notes in the article above, pop culture is filled to the brim with death and violence, but it's nearly always stylized: zombie, vampires, crazy serial killers. It's rare that, as a culture, we talk about regular people dying in regular ways.
Having just plowed my way through four books about death and charity in the Renaissance (it's been such a fun couple of days, you guys!), it's easy for me to get the impression that medieval and early modern people thought about death a lot. They joined confraternities that specialized in reciting litanies of their dead friends' and families' names. They created lengthy, specific wills. They built elaborate chapels and tombs to commemorate themselves and their families. It's understandable: they also died a lot. 14th Italy was certainly Renaissance-y, but it was also under continual assault by famines, plagues, earthquakes, and perpetual violence. It was a rough time, and it's understandable that death was near the forefront of people's thoughts.
In The Cult of Remembrance and the Black Death, Samuel Cohn Jr. develops a comparative study (based on an insane number of wills and testimonies) between Florence, Siena, Pisa, Perugia, Arezzo, and Assisi and explores how they distributed their money and how they dealt with their deaths. A lot of the book is based on using these wills to debunkc commonly held assumptions about the period. He counters (amends is probably the better word) Millard Meiss's theory of changing styles in art after the Black Death, and he debunks the idea that the 14th century marked a shift from traditional, pious gifts to monasteries and mendicant orders to a more 'modern' charity aimed at lay groups like confraternities and hospitals.
The work also goes on to make a couple points of its own. First, Cohn noted a split between his six cities. Though localism always predominated, he noted a continued divergence between Florence/Arezzo/Perugia and Siena/Assisi/Pisa in his study of their wills. The second group embodied traditional late medieval piety in wills: they tended to give lots of small gifts to lots of different groups, a kind of widespread scattering of wealth. Cohn associates this with mendicant piety, and the more ascetic notions of dissipating one's wealth. The first group, though, had a slightly different tendency. While they also frequently gave to many groups, there was a growing tendency in the early 14th century for men and women in these cities to leave larger bequests to a smaller number of people. And, importantly, these bequests increasingly were designed to commemorate the maker of the will and his/her family. Cohn traces the split between these cities to differing patterns of inheritance. Where women had less control over property - Florence, Arezzo, Perugia - there was a marked increase in the chance that wills would be directed towards perpetuating the memory of the paternal family line.
The second point Cohn makes is that this discrepancy largely disappeared after 1363 - the date that the plague returned to northern Italy for its second appearance. He argues that it was this return of the Black Death that really marked a shift in Italian thinking, and pushed a society largely centered on the dissipation of wealth at death into becoming one that would spent huge amounts of money commemorating themselves and their families in the face of the constant threat of death. It was here, Cohn suggests, that the idea of the "Renaissance individual" showed its widest application across all social classes.
It's a book full of good ideas (and impressive research, but it's a bit of a painful read. Most chapters are essentially a 25 page description of data points, followed by a 2-3 page conclusion. The conclusions are really, really interesting; the rest can be difficult. I think the book may have been better served by a tighter analysis in the main body of the text, followed by appendices that feature the data.
Having just plowed my way through four books about death and charity in the Renaissance (it's been such a fun couple of days, you guys!), it's easy for me to get the impression that medieval and early modern people thought about death a lot. They joined confraternities that specialized in reciting litanies of their dead friends' and families' names. They created lengthy, specific wills. They built elaborate chapels and tombs to commemorate themselves and their families. It's understandable: they also died a lot. 14th Italy was certainly Renaissance-y, but it was also under continual assault by famines, plagues, earthquakes, and perpetual violence. It was a rough time, and it's understandable that death was near the forefront of people's thoughts.
In The Cult of Remembrance and the Black Death, Samuel Cohn Jr. develops a comparative study (based on an insane number of wills and testimonies) between Florence, Siena, Pisa, Perugia, Arezzo, and Assisi and explores how they distributed their money and how they dealt with their deaths. A lot of the book is based on using these wills to debunkc commonly held assumptions about the period. He counters (amends is probably the better word) Millard Meiss's theory of changing styles in art after the Black Death, and he debunks the idea that the 14th century marked a shift from traditional, pious gifts to monasteries and mendicant orders to a more 'modern' charity aimed at lay groups like confraternities and hospitals.
The work also goes on to make a couple points of its own. First, Cohn noted a split between his six cities. Though localism always predominated, he noted a continued divergence between Florence/Arezzo/Perugia and Siena/Assisi/Pisa in his study of their wills. The second group embodied traditional late medieval piety in wills: they tended to give lots of small gifts to lots of different groups, a kind of widespread scattering of wealth. Cohn associates this with mendicant piety, and the more ascetic notions of dissipating one's wealth. The first group, though, had a slightly different tendency. While they also frequently gave to many groups, there was a growing tendency in the early 14th century for men and women in these cities to leave larger bequests to a smaller number of people. And, importantly, these bequests increasingly were designed to commemorate the maker of the will and his/her family. Cohn traces the split between these cities to differing patterns of inheritance. Where women had less control over property - Florence, Arezzo, Perugia - there was a marked increase in the chance that wills would be directed towards perpetuating the memory of the paternal family line.
The second point Cohn makes is that this discrepancy largely disappeared after 1363 - the date that the plague returned to northern Italy for its second appearance. He argues that it was this return of the Black Death that really marked a shift in Italian thinking, and pushed a society largely centered on the dissipation of wealth at death into becoming one that would spent huge amounts of money commemorating themselves and their families in the face of the constant threat of death. It was here, Cohn suggests, that the idea of the "Renaissance individual" showed its widest application across all social classes.
It's a book full of good ideas (and impressive research, but it's a bit of a painful read. Most chapters are essentially a 25 page description of data points, followed by a 2-3 page conclusion. The conclusions are really, really interesting; the rest can be difficult. I think the book may have been better served by a tighter analysis in the main body of the text, followed by appendices that feature the data.
Displaying 1 of 1 review