During the period from the late fourteenth to the early sixteenth century, preaching by members of religious orders, especially the Franciscans and Dominicans, generally strengthened ecclesiastical institutions, with obvious differences from country to country. They contributed to the improvement of political institutions and acted as an agent of renewal, which heightened religious awareness and probably participation and commitment by lay people.
In the areas which had remained faithful to the religious model of the Roman Church, the preaching phenomenon had very specific origins, inspired by reform, which happened first within the mendicant orders, which preachers of both orders sought to transmit to wider society. It had also particular characteristics within the Italian peninsula, due to the close ties between the Christian renewal of society and the establishment of papal power in its territories.
In such a context, we should not emphasise the effect of mechanisms of repression and exclusion promoted by the preachers and put into practice wherever the local authorities gave their consent, without also underlining the importance of instruments of integration: the effect of preaching in the vernacular and the hearing of individual confessions. It created a common morality based on Christian ethics.932 The promotion of confraternities by the preachers, organisations made up of devout lay people, led to further reinforcement of social solidarity within ruling and working classes. If these organisations were already in existence, the preachers encouraged them to be reactivated and enriched their spiritual activities. From the pulpits they advocated the establishment of new cults and devotions.933
The religious model proposed by the popular preachers became increasingly less influential from the last decades of the fifteenth century onwards, as it became subject to criticism in humanist intellectual milieux, and political opposition to the friars. Nonetheless, a religious position based on a homogenous morality aimed at the dominant classes in society and a behavioural ritualism which gathered a large part of the urban population was not fully undermined. It is significant that, in the years of crisis in Italian politics around the turn of the century, a whole series of female visionaries, the 'living saints' such as Lucia da Narni in Ferrara and others, drew much attention, as did hermits who prophesied the future, such as Bernardino da Parenzo in the Venetian Republic. Even the king of France, Louis XII, took a famous hermit, Francesco di Paola, back to his Parisian court.934 However, the breaking down of the confessional and institutional unity of the church in Europe after the Reformation and the partial penetration of new religious ideas over the Alps into Italy, led to a realignment of both the power structures and the social classes which governed them, from the ecclesiastical politics of the papacy in Rome to the international hegemony of the Spanish crown. The final outcome of the process was the imposition of a new model of Catholic Christianity, which emphasised doctrinal orthodoxy. This is sometimes called Catholic Reform. If late-medieval preaching was based on the relationship between preaching in the vernacular and the hearing of confessions, so from the beginning of the modern era onwards, the role of the catechism and inculcation of correct beliefs became pre-eminent.
World History
