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medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture On Tuesday, February 14, 2006, at 9:03 am, Christopher Crockett wrote: > did the Neopolitans at least get it right to the extent that the > mendicantswere sited in the poorer sections of town, whether > that/those quarter(s) > was/were "on the outer periphery" or not, John? Not initially and, after that, not always. Naples' first major Franciscan convent, San Lorenzo Maggiore (as it became), was located at the city's then major market area, diagonally opposite a major diocesan church, San Paolo Maggiore, and just up their north/south street from a major Benedictine house, San Gregorio Armeno. The cathedral was/is only a few blocks away (2 or 3 east on the Via dei Tribunali, the middle of the city's three east/west running _decumani_, and then a block or so north on the Via Duomo). The Franciscans could surely meet a lot of people of modest means here, but they were not really living among them. The first Dominican presence of any size, San Domenico Maggiore (as it became), was just off the lowest of the three _decumani_ but further west and in a mixed neighborhood of nobles and professionals. The first Augustinian convent, Sant'Agostino alla/della Zecca, was built in an open space on the southwestern corner of the hill on which the Old City stands. A cliff separated it from the suburbs below and the area just to its east was occupied primarily by wealthy tradespeople. It was a fairly short walk from here down to the Piazza della Sellaria, another busy market area, but the area itself was not poor. These three houses were built on sites given them by major patrons (ecclesiastical in the case of the Franciscans and the Dominicans; royal in the case of the Augustinians). In the later thirteenth century all three houses were recipients of significant royal patronage; each became its order's mother house for the entire kingdom, housing its _studium_, its inquisitors, and various important guests. They were thus administrative centers and as the Middle Ages wore on they and their neighborhoods also became tonier. San Lorenzo was one of the crown's funerary churches during the Angevin period; San Domenico was the Aragonese funerary church. Sant'Agostino became identified with the _popolo grosso_, whose leaders often lived in its vicinity and whose civic meetings took place on its premises. All three also had important connections with the university, with the Dominicans (who were located just above it) being clearly _primi inter pares_ in this regard. We're not talking about _ordinary_ mendicant houses here. As all this was going on, the population grew both in the city proper and in its suburbs between the hill and the sea. Mendicants were here also, though less prominently. To correct something I said yesterday, the very first Franciscan house at Naples was not San Lorenzo but rather Santa Maria, founded near the port in 1216 at a site that was so good that in the 1260s Charles I chose it for Castel Nuovo. The Franciscans were moved slightly up the hill to Santa Maria la Nova, which remained throughout the later Middle Ages the chief Franciscan house for the port area. Located at the western edge of the Old City in or just next to a poor residential area, and occupied by strictly Observant Franciscans, it fits the order's stereotype in ways that San Lorenzo and the royally patronized convents of Santa Chiara (double) and Santa Maria di Donnaregina (women only; both in tony neighborhoods) did not. The Dominicans also had a smaller house near the port, San Pietro Martire, founded in 1299. The area southeast of the Old City that was included within the early fourteenth-century Angevin wall included, in addition to open space and previously existing monasteries, one mixed noble and bourgeois district (Porta Nova) and a string of poorer neighborhoods running east along the coast from the port. Its southeast corner was anchored by Piazza Mercato, an early project of Charles I that was bracketed on the east by Hospitaler foundation of San Giovanni a Mare and the adjacent lay- confraternity-managed hospital of Sant'Eligio (ecclesiastically subject to the archdiocese) and on the west by the Carmelites of Santa Maria del Carmine. There were smaller mendicant houses in the former suburbs north of here, including two royally founded Franciscan houses for former prostitutes (Santa Maria Maddalena and Santa Maria Egiziaca; neither seems to have been still Franciscan in the late fifteenth century) and the variously Celestinian and Dominican Santa Caterina a Formiello, which treated sick and weary travellers. To the northeast, the fourteenth-century Reformed Augustinian house of San Giovanni alla Carbonara, sited next to the town dump, was adjacent to another poor suburb and ministered to the poor long before it attracted significant royal and noble patronage in the fifteenth century. So, yes, there _were_ mendicant houses in poor areas. As well as others in areas that were (or quickly became) anything but poor. Two recent art historical books dealing in part with this material are Caroline Bruzelius, _The Stones of Naples: Church Building in Angevin Italy, 1266-1343_ (Yale Univ. Pr., 2004), and Janis Elliott and Cordelia Warr, eds., _The Church of Santa Maria Donna Regina: Art, Iconography and Patronage in Fourteenth-Century Naples_ Ashgate, 2004). Best again, John Dillon ********************************************************************** To join the list, send the message: join medieval-religion YOUR NAME to: [log in to unmask] To send a message to the list, address it to: [log in to unmask] To leave the list, send the message: leave medieval-religion to: [log in to unmask] In order to report problems or to contact the list's owners, write to: [log in to unmask] For further information, visit our web site: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/medieval-religion.html