Contemporary chronicles and a painted panel from the end of the fifteenth century combine to reveal the fact that the Jews were forced to listen to Giovanni da Capestrano's public preaching while he was active in Germany.924 The infamous expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290 and France in 1306 (long before they were chased out of the reunified kingdom of Spain in 1492) meant that the Italian peninsula and the German-speaking countries were the parts of Europe with the largest Jewish communities in late medieval Europe.
Traditional anti-Jewish attitudes, encouraged by the literal tone of the Christian liturgy, were an inherent feature of preaching even when not explicitly under discussion, and they were a powerful component of the preaching of the Franciscan friars. Surprisingly, there are no visible traces of these attitudes in their representation in Italian devotional art, unlike the depictions of the Friar Preacher, Vincent Ferrer, in images made after his canonisation in 1458.
Beyond the undeniable fanaticism with which the Franciscan Bernardino da Feltre promoted the institution of the Monti di pietd (institutions which provided loans on the basis of small pledges) in an atmosphere of feverish anti-Judaism, it is interesting to compare the situation in different parts of the Italian peninsula.925 In the territories of the Papal States, where the Monti di pietd were established - tellingly - with the backing of the local authorities, there were no major manifestations of hostility towards the Jews, probably because they also benefited from papal protection. This may explain the reluctance with which the Roman ecclesiastical authorities greeted the request of the bishop of Trent, Johannes Hinderbach, for the canonisation of the child Simone, the victim of a ritual murder allegedly perpetrated by Jews at Easter 1475. The Observant Franciscan preachers were strenuous advocates for this cult, as attested by the widespread diffusion of devotional iconography of the young 'martyr' in northern Italy, and in the German-speaking countries neighbouring Trent. The government of the Venetian Republic took a careful line on the subject, quickly expelling friars who did not respect the prohibition of preaching on the cult of the 'blessed' Simone within its territories. Similarly, the cult of another alleged victim of ritual murder, one Lorenzino da Marostica, never extended beyond his local land.
The hostility towards the Jews apparent in Franciscan preaching in Italy resulted from a complex blend of issues. The concept of a Christian society and a Christian economy was central to Franciscan preaching, and anything which appeared opposite was denounced and expelled. This position was already established by the second half of the thirteenth century, and was developed further as a result of the impact of the writings of the Provencal Franciscan Pierre de Jean Olieu on Bernardino da Siena. Their conception of the economy set them in direct opposition to the only group in Western society which was radically other: the Jewish communities.926
The Franciscans could proceed in this enterprise wherever the local authorities gave their backing. Where they enjoyed the support of town officials, friars could preach in this manner with impunity. It was much the same for another of the aims of fourteenth-century Observant preaching: the abolition of 'superstition'. The use of this term in vernacular preaching and the Latin sermons referred first to the kind of beliefs which they defined as fatuitas (which did not, however, contain any magical or ritual elements), but also to those practices which involved the sacrilegious use of the Christian liturgy, and to incantamenta, which were linked to witchcraft.927 The difficulty of distinguishing between such practices, which were often domestic in nature and associated with feminine spheres of activity, is evident from the trial initiated in Rome in 1426 against a lower-class woman by the name of Finicella. An inflammatory sermon by Bernardino da Siena the previous year led to her death at the stake, when she was accused of witchcraft and numerous infanticides, allegedly caused by vampirism. This case, like that of the 'witch' Matteuccia in Todi in 1428, who met the same miserable end as a result of the work of the same friar, reveals the vulnerability of women who worked as midwives and functioned as healers.928 929
Preaching and repression of 'superstitions' and 'witchcraft' could therefore only go ahead with the support of the local authorities. It is extremely telling that when Bernardino da Siena preached in Arezzo in 1425, and wished to promote the destruction of a fons tecta (hidden well) which had been linked to popular beliefs, rituals and active powers, especially of female sterility, his proposals met with no support from the local officials. For broadly similar reasons, Dominican friars such as Samuele Cassini had to wait until the end of the fifteenth century before they were allowed to enact persecutions of customs that seemed to be witchcraft in mountains of Lombardy and Piedmont.
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