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
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