The Sacred and the Secular in Renaissance Florence: Vallombrosan Exorcisms and the Rise of Observant Mendicancy

Seeking to heal people possessed by demons, stave off Lorenzo de' Medici's predations, and compete with the meteoric rise of Observant Mendicants--Franciscans and Dominicans--monks known as Vallombrosans performed multiple exorcisms in Florence and its countryside in the latter half of the fifteenth century. The accounts they wrote to publicize their efforts present an unusually lively survey of a little-studied sea change in late medieval religious life. In a religious landscape populated by Mendicant charlatans dressed as John the Baptist, concupiscent clerics, and pompous prelates, the Vallombrosans positioned themselves as committed to the decorous healing of Florentine peasants and nobles while weighing in on contemporary politics and claiming insight into Medici-related affairs such as the recent Pazzi Conspiracy. Yet traditional religious orders like the Vallombrosans and the Benedictines could not match the publicity, popularity, and secular political support garnered by Observant Mendicants in urban areas, and the latter's ascendance left religion at the end of the fifteenth century looking very different from what it had at its beginning. By the century's end, Observants predominated in influence, prestige, and patronage in cities across all of Europe. Sanctioning economic gain, addressing worldly moral dilemmas, and moving away from the older monastic focus on the dead and the afterlife, they shifted their focus to contemporary concerns. As over a traditional focus on communal life and monastic healing, Observants inaugurated individualistic forms of piety and fostered alternative forms of lay sociability and healing in the form of confraternities and urban hospitals. This rich study of the forces which impelled a group of Florentine monks to perform exorcisms opens a kaleidoscopic window onto religious practice, political and religious entanglements, and a decisive shift in religious and political life that transformed the fifteenth century.