In the course of his preaching in southern Germany, especially in Nuremberg and Bamberg, where his words were translated into the local language by interpreters, Giovanni da Capestrano imported a ritual practice which had become a characteristic of Observant preaching in Italy. This was the 'bonfire of the vanities', which is documented from the first decades of the fifteenth century in relation to Bernardino da Siena's preaching, and after him by others, most notably his fellow Franciscan Bernardino da Feltre, and the Dominican Girolamo Savonarola in Florence, and at the beginning of the sixteenth century by another Franciscan, Giovanni da Fano.920
Planned as a ritual involving not only the audience, but the whole lay population, the 'bonfire' represented a forceful means of exerting pressure on the authorities towards scrutiny and control of the personal behaviour of citizens. The event was imbued with a supernatural atmosphere which would sometimes manifest itself in the spectators' conviction that they had seen the devil himself escaping through the flames. They generally burned gaming equipment and women's accessories, but in some cases they also burned weapons and the banners of the factions, which clearly demonstrates the political significance of such events. Their suppression of all forms of gaming was not motivated purely by moral considerations; it had to do with a programme of social control which had been agreed between the preachers and the authorities. The preachers linked the ideas of 'crime' and 'sin', and their critique even touched on cherished collective rituals of civic life. In Perugia, for example, the sassaiola, a battle fought with stones and wooden weapons, was prohibited. The sassaiola served both to defuse aggression and as a trial of prowess, but it was deemed immorally violent and so was critiqued. Elsewhere, the preacher's sermons were not so successful, precisely because of the opposition of the authorities in Venice, for example, the 'guerra dei pugni' (war of fists) continued well up to the modern period.921
The Observant Franciscans' vehement fight against female adornment, which corresponded with the anti-sumptuary and anti-magnate policies found in Italian towns, had a doctrinal precedent in the Llibre de les dones of the Catalan friar Francesc Eiximenis (1330-1409). It was also treated extensively in the De usu cuiuscumque ornatus of Giovanni da Capestrano, which also circulated in the vernacular for a wider readership as the Trattato degli ornamenti specie delle donne (Treatise on the Different Kinds of Women’s Adornment). The arguments adopted by the preachers in the pulpit were founded on a particular reading of Christian morality: wealth represented the theft of goods from the poor, and it distorted the natural functioning of the market. The Observant friars' attention to a 'natural' working of the economy led them to consider wealth as a sort of sinful overturning of the social order. Their preaching had a substantially misogynistic tone, even though they proclaimed repeatedly the centrality of women to the family, their primary function being to promote the Christian upbringing of children. Preachers also ascribed the spread of 'sodomy' (i. e., male homosexuality) to women's adornment, since the cost of a wedding in their opinion dissuaded men from marriage. Female adornment was seen as distorting the female role in family life; it was a target which found willing adherents both among the friars and the governing elite, from whose ranks the major representative members of the religious orders were recruited.922
While games were suppressed, festivals were regulated, and new devotions and rituals were introduced in turn.923 Bernardino da Siena's motion of the devotion to the Name of Jesus was particularly successful (although it was the target of accusations of heresy from other religious orders, and even from the papacy). The intention was to create an alternative symbol to the insignias of the factions, and it finally became a cult followed in several Tuscan towns, above all, Siena. Giacomo della Marca did not succeed in creating a similar cult for the Blood of Christ (another initiative stymied for reasons of orthodox theology), but the use of the image of the Christus patiens for the banners of the Monti di pietd, promoted by Bernardino da Feltre, was more successful.
World History
