Foaming Mouth and Eyes Aflame: Exorcism and Power in Renaissance Florence

This study examines a series of exorcism manuscripts written in the late fifteenth century by the Vallombrosans, an order of monks based outside of Florence, to make a series of claims about late medieval and Renaissance religion, the state, the relationship between religion and the territorial state, and desacralization, or secularism. The Vallombrosan order addressed a series of manuscripts describing the exorcisms of possessed peasants to Lorenzo de'Medici to gain his favor and win popular support in the face of a host of difficulties. Lorenzo was threatening to overtake Vallombrosan monasteries via the institution of commenda; the Vallombrosan order was roiled in schism over rival models of observant reform; and Vallombrosan social status had dropped precipitously on account of the monastery's rural status and geographic marginality. The order felt itself in competition with other orders, in particular Mendicants and seculars, for pilgrims and patronage, and the status of exorcism was on the decline in late medieval Florence. Unbelief and skepticism, combined with consequent demands for demonstrative proof of the authenticity of miracles, were on the rise.;The Vallombrosans used their exorcism manuscripts to address these problems, making distinctions between themselves and the rural peasants they served, marshaling an array of demonstrative proofs of the authenticity of theft miracles, and showing how their practices aligned with authoritative church opinion, particularly in regards to the then-current offensive against 'peasant magic'. Their approach was markedly different from that of the Mendicant orders, who enjoyed stronger relations to both Florentine society and power both secular and papal, and the Vallombrosans may therefore be taken to represent a gentler style of piety that was on the decline. The Vallombrosans used their manuscripts to update their image from an outdated focused upon simony, showing how through exorcism, they ministered to peasants in the Florentine contado both pastorally and judicially, a ploy which may have been meant to gain autonomy or show compliance with the goals of the Florentine state. The Vallombrosans harnessed various strains of rhetoric, namely humanism and civicism, but also the budding vocabularies of scientific 'experiment' and the new discipline of history, to legitimate their order. As might be expected, they heaped praise upon Laurentian clerics and devotions, but drew hard lines between themselves and the Florentine diocesan church, disparaging its cathedral clerics and devotions. But the Vallombrosans were not uniformly deferent toward Lorenzo. They inserted coded threats in their texts, outlining how diabolically inspired peasants in Florence's frontier territories and scandals generated by their exorcisms could lead to political unrest even in the urban center of Florence. In the short term, the political counsels and object-lessons offered by the Vallombrosans likely informed the thought and decisions of Lorenzo along with Girolamo Savonarola and Niccolo Machiavelli. In the longer term, the social divides revealed and promoted by the Vallombrosan texts widened, with the result that exorcism, the demonic, lower-class individuals, and the miraculous were eliminated from the Vallombrosan self-concept. The Vallombrosans and their stories fit into the historiographies of late medieval religion, statebuilding, 'church-state' relations and desacralization or secularism. As to these last two, Vallombrosans expressed a complex relation to state power, for paradoxically, it both promoted and undermined the state. As to desacralization, the subtraction of marvels and the miraculous from Vallombrosan works were not, contrary to standard narratives, a response to discourses of science or enlightenment, but to political and social pressures. The fact that the Vallombrosans were excluded from Florentine history and historiography points to the need for a creative and discipline-crossing microhistorical approach, one which takes examines unusual and untried sources produced by marginalized groups so as to provide a needed perspective on the overarching narratives constructed from the perspective of those in power.