Le Expositiones super Regulam, chiamate anche Commenti alla Regola, sono dei prodotti culturali che si occupano dell’esegesi di un testo normativo, la Regola, alla base del diritto e dell’identità di un Ordine religioso. I Commenti si contraddistinguono per la più grande varietà di autori, contesti e finalità il cui unico elemento in comune sembra quello di porre al centro del proprio discorso l’osservanza della Regola.

Talk to be presented at Weingarten, December 1st 2018

Die Einführung der Observanz und die damit zusammenhängenden Streitigkeiten stehen in Mitteleuropa bereits länger im Fokus der Forschung. Allerdings fand die Perspektive der Stadträte, die die Reformmaßnahmen unterstützten, bisher weniger Beachtung.

Talk to be presented at Weingarten, November 30 2018

In his Buch der Reformacio, the observant confessor and convent writer Johannes Meyer compared himself to the biblical Rut to describe his work in the Observance. Like Rut, there former went out to support his family, the Dominican order, and did not leave a part of his relatives, the female branch of the order, behind. By comparing himself to such a great character well-known for her loyalty and caring, Johannes Meyer wanted to create a new image of the observant confessors thus proving that at the time of the convent reforms, confessors like Johannes Meyer had to rethink their notions of the relationship between the female convents and the order.

Talk to be presented at Weingarten, November 29 2018

The architectural norms enacted by regular orders are not only indicative of the way the orders “represent themselves in architecture” (cf. Dominique Donadieu-Rigaut, “Penser en images les ordres religieux), but also of their administrative framework (their level of centralisation in particular) and of their relationship with the laity. They might help us answer the following questions: What was the laity’s place in the monastic space ? To what extent did religious communities follow the artistic changes of their time?

Talk to be presented at Weingarten, November 30 2018

The multifaceted Observant movement was one of the driving forces in the attempts to reform the fifteenth-century Church. Yet the direct and permanent institutional involvement was not an obvious choice for Observant leaders.

Talk to be presented in Weingarten, November 30 2018

Entgegen einer Auffassung, die die Selbstwirksamkeit und Selbstregulierungskompetenz der Orden als Quelle von Reformen voraussetzt sollen Akteure vorgestellt werden, die von außerhalb die Orden reformierten.

Talk to be presented at Weingarten, December 1st 2018

The desire to lead a pure and intense spiritual life was very present among the late medieval society. The Observant movement had important consequences on the identity and charisma of the monastic and religious orders that aspired to recover a splendor that they considered lost, through the (re) construction and the (re) creation of the past. 

Talk to be presented in Weingarten, December 1st 2018

The support that Italian elites lavished on the new religious foundations of the fifteenth century, and especially the houses of the Observant movement, is well known. The Este family’s patronage of the Poor Clares of Corpus Domini in Ferrara and Cosimo de’ Medici’s financial backing for the Dominicans at San Marco in Florence are just two examples that can stand for many dozen such major construction projects.  Most patronage, however, was conducted at afar less spectacular level, through the exchange of prayers, letters, religious objects, and liturgical books.  

Talk to be presented in Weingarten, November 29 2018

John Capistran is an emblematic figure of the Franciscan Observance in the fifteenth century Italy. Son of a baron who came to Italy following Louis I. of Anjou, he obtained licentia in iure civili in 1412 in Perugia, where he served as iudex ad civilia during the following years, when the city was subjected to the king of Naples Ladislas I. of Anjou Durazzo. He was, therefore, involved in the political and social conflicts which characterized the decline of the Comuni and marked the affirmation of the lordships in central Italy. Following the occupation of Perugia by Braccio da Montone (1416), he was imprisoned and, according to his oldest biographers, this experience would have determined his conversion. In 1416 he took the Franciscan habit, and the next year he made his religious profession in Monteripido, one of the main branches of the Observance movement in Italy. He was, therefore, one of the protagonists of the project to reaffirm the regimen christianum in Europe, which the Franciscan Observants pursued in the service of the Papacy, while universalism on the political and juridical level was fragmented due to spreading of particularisms and the schism of the Western Church (1378-1417).