‘You cannot sell liberty for all the gold there is’: promoting good governance in early...

‘You cannot sell liberty for all the gold there is’:promoting good governance in early Renaissance

Florence

Peter Howard

Once upon a time a Dog happens to come upon a Wolf in the forest.The Wolf says to him: How bright your coat shines, and it is evidentthat you are treated well.The Dog answers him: I keep my master’s house welland I bark at thieves who come into the house of my master,For which he and his men give me plenty of good meat.So I am well fed and happy.The Wolf stirs at this pronouncement: I long that you have me dwellwith you.That you and I can share dinner.Well, says the Dog, come along with me if you wish to be as welllooked after as me.The Wolf concurs and follows the Dog, but notices the Dog’s neck,and asks: Why is your hair so thin?He replies: It is because of the collar by which I am daily fastened,By night I roam as commanded.The Wolf replies with these words:It is not for me to have so much bounty,In order to be willing to become a slave to fill my belly.For I am free and will not be a slave.Liberty, a sweet good, preserves other goods;Which unless itself preserved, nothing tastes like food to me.Liberty is the food of the soul, and is a true desire. [. . .]

This article originated in a paper presented at the Renaissance Society of America Annual Conference, Chicago,2008. Special thanks are due to Bill Kent, Lorenzo Polizzotto and Jane Drakard who read early drafts, as well asto the two anonymous readers for Renaissance Studies whose comments I found invaluable, along with those ofmembers of the Arts Faculty Medieval-Renaissance Research Group – Constant Mews, Clare Monagle, SalihYucel and Michael Fagenblat. I am grateful to the Outside Studies Programme of the Faculty of Arts, MonashUniversity, for time and funding to pursue the initial research and writing._ 207..233

Renaissance Studies Vol. 24 No. 2 DOI: 10.1111/j.1477-4658.2009.00623.x

© 2009 The AuthorJournal compilation © 2009 The Society for Renaissance Studies, Blackwell Publishing Ltd

You cannot sell liberty for all the gold there is;For liberty is better than all the gold of the world.1

This version of Aesop’s fable of ‘The Dog, the Wolf and the Collar’ – attrib-uted to the twelfth-century author, Walter the Englishman (Gualterus Anglicus)– is, perhaps, an unusual point of departure for a consideration of how themuch prized republican freedom of Florence and cherished notions of politywere kept alive in the public arena.2 The fables circulated in Florence in thefifteenth century as a Latin school text (as it had, indeed, since at least thethirteenth century), but were also disseminated more widely through vernacu-lar translations read in the home.3 The fable’s epimythium – ‘You cannot sellliberty for all the gold there is’ – is quoted with illocutionary force by apreacher to conclude a discussion of temporal goods, and in particular,‘power and freedom in the affairs of men’ (praesidentiae et libertas humanalis).This preacher, Fra Antonino Pierozzi OP (1389–1459), was emerging in the1420s as a notable force in Florence at the very moment when the Medici andthe Albizzi factions were struggling for dominance. He was the Lentenpreacher in 1427, and as we shall see, his sermons reflected both the prevail-ing tensions and the traditional values and ideals that guided the republic atthe end of that perilous decade.4 He became Florence’s influential arch-bishop, able to stride across town from his palace to pound on the doors of thePalazzo della Signoria – the centre of government – should circumstancesdemand. The opinions of Fra Antonino Pierozzi OP mattered. His writingswere the most published, apart from the bible, in the first fifty years after theadvent of printing.5

The familiarity of Aesop’s tales among Florentines begins to explain why thefable’s concluding moral should be quoted by this particular Dominican friar.In periods of civic stress, texts such as this, when incorporated into a preach-er’s discourse, were anything but benign stories; they touched upon deep

1 Romuleae fabulae Gualteri Anglici, LIV: ‘De Cane et Lupo’, in Léopold Hervieux (ed.), Les fabulistes latins:Depuis le siècle d’Auguste jusqu’à la fin du moyen âge, 5 vols. (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1893–1899), Vol. 2, 344. For acritical edition see Aaron E. Wright, The Fables of ‘Walter of England’ (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of MediaevalStudies Publications, 1997), 139–42.

2 On this see Ronald Witt, ‘The Rebirth of the Concept of Republican Liberty in Italy’, in Anthony Molho andJohn Tedeschi (eds.), Renaissance Studies in Honor of Hans Baron (Dekalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois UniversityPress, 1971), 173–99, esp. 189–99, and the corrective on Ptolemy of Lucca noted by James Blyth, ‘ “CivicHumanism” and Medieval Political Thought’, in James Hankins (ed.), Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisalsand Reflections, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 30–74, at 41–2.

3 See below, n. 51.4 Gene Brucker, The Civic World of Renaissance Florence (Princeton: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 472.5 See Raoul Morçay, Saint Antonin, Fondateur du Couvent de Saint-Marc, Archevêque de Florence, 1389–1459 (Paris:

Libraire Gabalda, 1913), 260. For an image and description of Archbishop Antonino and the FlorentineSignoria, see Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby, ‘Giambologna’s Salviati reliefs of St Antoninus of Florence: Saintly Imagesand Political Manipulation’, Renaissance Studies, 22 (2008), 197–220 (esp. 208–10), and Sally Cornelison,’Talesof Two Bishop Saints: Zenobius and Antoninus in Florentine Renaissance Art and History’, The Sixteenth CenturyJournal, 38 (2007), 627–56; on the printing history see Peter F. Howard, Beyond the Written Word: Preaching andTheology in the Florence of Archbishop Antoninus (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1995), 127–48.

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impulses in Florentine society and, read ‘against the grain’, signify a tensesocial reality. A population accustomed to the strategies of preachers, and theexempla – colourful stories, both biblical and anecdotal – with which theypeppered their sermons, could easily relate the snippet Fra Antonino quotedto the fable’s larger whole.6 The citizen of the late medieval city could belikened to a ‘living concordance’: the quotation of a phrase from the Bible orfable evoked the entire narrative from which it was drawn.7

In what follows I explore the role of Archbishop Antonino’s contribution,both as a preacher and theoretician, to the political language of early-to-mid-fifteenth-century Florence, especially in keeping before his public the long-held Florentine ideals of the common good and liberty. I also introduce amajor, previously unrecognized and unremarked source which Antoninoredacted and incorporated into the fourth part of his Summa Theologica: thelate thirteenth-century treatise on the cardinal virtues by the DominicanHenry of Rimini (fl. 1308).

Though not my primary focus, an examination of recurring topoi in FraAntonino’s preaching has points of contact with current re-evaluations ofHans Baron’s approach to the republican ideology for which he coined theterm Bürgerhumanismus – ‘civic humanism’.8 The redefinition of what hasbecome a shorthand concept for Florentine historians must be based, it haseven been argued, on ‘a radical rethinking of the meaning of Florentineliberty’.9 In this present essay I am interested in the meanings which particu-lar sets of words assumed when preached in particular contexts. I examinethe sources of these vocabularies and the issue of what verbal borrowingfrom other authors might or might not mean for the impact and authority ofthe preacher’s message. Indeed, in the case of Florence and Fra Antonino, Iargue that directly adopted language served to link particular utterances to

6 For a discussion of the function of exempla see Peter Howard, ‘Preaching Magnificence in RenaissanceFlorence’, Renaissance Quarterly 61:2 (2008), 325–69 at 348–9, 354–5; idem, Beyond the Written Word, 93–4. For themorphology of the exemplum, with particular reference to fables and the epimythium, see Wanda OstrowskaKaufmann, The Anthropology of Wisdom Literature (Westport, Conn.: Bergin & Garvey, 1996), 1–10, 117–40 (forintra- and extra-textual functions).

7 For an examination of the implications of this approach for the reception of frescoes and other images seePeter Howard, ‘The Womb of Memory’: Carmelite Liturgy and the Frescoes of the Brancacci Chapel’, in TheBrancacci Chapel: Form, Function and Setting. Collected Essays of a Symposium Held 6–7 June 2003 in The HarvardUniversity Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti, ed. Nicholas Eckstein (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2007),177–206, esp. 199–205. For a stimulating approach to the reception of sermons, see David L. D’Avray, Death andthe Prince: Memorial Preaching before 1350 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 185–221.

8 For a recent review of the changing scholarship on the Baron thesis (Hans Baron, The Crisis of the EarlyItalian Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955)) see James Hankins, ‘Introduction’, idem(ed.), Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2000), 1–13. This volume is especially valuable, in particular the contributions by Connell, Blythe, Najemy,Hörnqvist, Hankins, Brown and Nederman. For a discussion of civic humanism in the context of Medicipower, see Mark Jurdjevic, ‘Civic Humanism and the Rise of the Medici’, Renaissance Quarterly, 52 (1999),994–1020.

9 Mikael Hörnqvist, ‘The Two Myths of Civic Humanism’, in Hankins, Renaissance Civic Humanism, 105–142,at 109.

Promoting good governance in early Renaissance Florence 209

a longer tradition and to shared ideals originating in the city’s past, butintegrated such discourse into a new outlook prompted by the circumstancesof the moment.10

I

That Fra Antonino was a native of the city of Florence was enough to recom-mend him to Leonardo Bruni, the city’s humanist chancellor, since it implieda commitment to Florence’s well-being and insight into the souls of thepopulace.11 The son of a notary, Antonino was renowned for his achievements,excellence and virtue, as well as for the crowd of devotees who continuallyflocked to where he resided just outside the city walls.12 The mentor whoinspired Fra Antonino had been Giovanni Dominici, his ‘famous, learned’master ‘who first in Italy raised and revived the life of the regular observancein the Order of Preachers’.13 As a preacher, according to Antonino, Dominicishowed ‘extreme seriousness in both the subject matter and style’ of hispreaching (to be contrasted, perhaps, with those who resembled ‘apes morethan preachers’, in Poggio Bracciolini’s memorable phrase14), with a voicethat ‘rang clear as a trumpet’ and perfectly modulated. His teaching was notonly clear but also charmed, and ‘softened the most obdurate of hearts’.15 Thiswas Fra Antonino’s own appraisal of the master who had inducted him intoboth the Dominican Order, and a local tradition of civic preaching thatharked back to Remigio de’ Girolami (fl. c. 1300), and Ptolemy of Lucca (alsofl. c. 1300) with a focus on ‘il bene commune’ (bonum commune) – the commongood. While often critical of those who were overly zealous for the studiahumanitatis as a basis for civic life, Dominici had been nonetheless open to thesome of the ideas of the ‘civic humanism’ of his contemporaries ColuccioSalutati and Leonardo Bruni.16 Fra Antonino refers to how Dominici had thedoctrines of the ‘poets and philosophers’ in mind so that he could touch on

10 See Howard, ‘The Aural Space of the Sacred’. See too Blyth, ‘“Civic Humanism” and medieval politicalthought’, 30–74, esp. 32.

11 Howard, Beyond the Written Word, 139.12 See the letter (11 May 1429) of Leonardo Bruni to Leonardo Dati, then Vicar General of the Observant

Dominicans, Archivio di Stato, Florence, Signori, Carteggi, Prima Cancelleria, XXXII, 74v–75r, see Howard,Beyond the Written Word, 139.

13 For this assessment by Fra Antonino, see Howard, Beyond the Written Word, 55.14 Quoted by Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby, Renaissance Florence in the Rhetoric of Two Popular Preachers: Giovanni

Dominici (1356–1419) and Bernardino da Siena (1380–1444) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), 1.15 Fra Antonino on Dominici is quoted in Howard, Beyond the Written Word, 233. For Dominici as preacher and

religious reformer in Florence see Debby, Renaissance Florence in the Rhetoric of Two Popular Preachers, 22–7.16 Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby, ‘Political Views in the Preaching of Giovanni Dominici in Renaissance Florence,

1400–1406’, Renaissance Quarterly, 55 (2002), 19–48 at p. 21. For views on Dominici’s approach to humanism seePeter Denley, ‘Giovanni Dominici’s Opposition to Humanism’, in Keith Robbins (ed.), Religion and Humanism(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 103–14. Whether the term ‘civic humanism’ best describes Bruni’shumanism is now increasingly a matter of debate. See below.

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them, and even draw on their opinions, in his preaching and writing.17 FraAntonino himself was even more receptive to the humanist ideas and modesof thought than Dominici, and adopted humanist modes of rhetoric whenrequired.18 He counted Bruni amongst his friends and drew extensively on hiswritings, and in his later years, appointed the humanist, Francesco da Castigli-one (later a canon at San Lorenzo), as his secretary.19

This present essay is predicated upon the role of preaching in later medi-eval and early modern Italy especially, and what it meant for developing whatmight be termed the social imagination of Florentine citizens. Progressively,historians are appreciating the extent to which preaching was a central activityin Italian cities in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and the ways in whicha preacher’s power depended on his capacity to use words, to stir emotions,and to act as a kind of charismatic centre for a receptive cohort of devotees.Daniel Lesnick’s pioneering study of Dominican and Franciscan preaching inFlorence in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century sought to corre-late the style and content of such public discourse with the profound social,political and economic changes occurring in the city at that time.20 Otherstudies since have extended the chronology and the range of issues studied toinclude the role of preachers in mediating peace, the relationship betweenthe preacher’s words, images, and art, as well as the role of memory anddevotion in both the composition and reception of paintings and frescoes.21

While success was related to the words themselves and the mode of delivery,it was more often those preachers who could connect with people’s ‘very wayof living’ who held sway by drawing together experience and tradition to

17 See Antoninus, Summa Historialis, MS Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Florence, II.I.376, tit. XXIII, col.345vb: ‘Rarissime allegabat poetas vel philosophos cum tamen dogmata eorum in mente haberet ut patet inopusculis eius; sed sententias eorum’; Howard, Beyond the Written Word, 233.

18 Howard, Beyond the Written Word, 227–30; idem, ‘Diversity in Discourse: Archbishop Antoninus’ Sermonsbefore Pope, Commune and People’, in Jacqueline Hamess, Beverly Mayne Kienzle, Debra L. Stoudt, and AnneThayer (eds.), Medieval Sermons and Society: Cloister, City, University (Textes et Études du Moyen Age, 9. Louvain-la-Neuve: Federation Internationale des Instituts d’Etudes Médiévale, Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), 283–307.

19 On Antonino’s use of Bruni’s writings see Howard, ‘Preaching Magnificence in Renaissance Florence’,340; on Antonino, humanism and Castiglione, see Howard, Beyond the Written Word, 227–37.

20 Daniel Lesnick, Preaching in Medieval Florence: The Social World of Franciscan and Dominican Spirituality(Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1989). For a critique of Lesnick’s approach to the nature ofthe sermon see Howard, Beyond the Written Word, 116–17, n. 32.

21 See e.g. Augustine Thompson OP, Revival Preachers and Politics in Thirteenth-Century Italy: The Great Devotionof 1233 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Howard, Beyond the Written Word; Franco Mormando, The Preacher’sDemons: Bernardino of Siena and the Social Underworld of Early Renaissance Italy (Chicago and London: ChicagoUniversity Press, 1999); Cynthia Polecritti, Preaching Peace in Renaissance Italy: Bernardino of Siena and his Audience(Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2000); Debby, Renaissance Florence in the Rhetoric of TwoPopular Preachers; Howard, ‘The Womb of Memory’, and the recent, celebrated study by Lina Bolzoni, The Webof Images: Vernacular Preaching from its Origins to St Bernardino da Siena (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), first publishedas La rete delle immagini: Predicazione in volgare dalle origini a Bernardino da Siena (Turin: Einaudi, 2002).The general scholarly literature on preaching is growing; see Beverly Mayne Kienzle (ed.), The Sermon(Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), and Carolyn Muessig (ed.), Preacher, Sermon and Audience in the Middle Ages, (Leiden-Boston-Cologne: Brill, 2002). For a convenient guide to sermon studies as a discipline see C. Muessig, ‘Sermon,Preacher and Society in the Middle Ages’, Journal of Medieval History, 28 (2002), 73–91.


create a sense of history, purpose and continuity amongst hearers. In the viewof Leonardo Bruni, writing as chancellor in 1429, Fra Antonino was just sucha preacher, and he sought to have him remain in Florence ‘for the consolationof the whole city’ and for a range of reasons ‘concerning the public good’.22

While the scholarly literature does not generally include Fra Antoninoamongst ‘the usual suspects’ of popular preachers,23 he was one of those whoheld sway in Florence, not by populist theatrics – in his mode of delivery heemulated Dominici’s gravity and dignity – but rather by his insight intopeople’s very way of life.24 Close examination of the works of ‘the usualsuspects’ such as Remigio de’ Girolami, Bernardino of Siena, and GirolamoSavonarola have drawn attention to the degree to which they adapted tradi-tional theological auctores to the particular problems of their time and place.25

That they moulded their theology in response to contemporary influencesand events means that the historian, if she or he is to be consistent with thisline of reasoning, needs to be chary in generalizing beyond the preacher’sparticular circumstances (though the historiography reveals this to be ageneral tendency). The decades spanning the late 1420s to the late 1480s (andthe appearance of Savonarola on the scene) remain largely unexplored fromthe perspective of sermon studies. An examination of the corpus of FraAntonino, whose career corresponded with crucial developments in theRenaissance city, can contribute to this lacuna, at least for the crucial decadesup until 1460. Preaching was fundamental to the future Florentine archbish-op’s understanding of civic life. Effective and influential preachers were thosewho explored the anxieties and needs of the urban laity so that their dis-courses were able to be, as he explained, ‘entirely civic and according to moralphilosophy’, shaping zealous, righteous citizens with a profoundly civicorientation.26

Throughout the fifteenth-century, city governments sought charismaticpreachers with the gift of rousing oratory in order to inflame renewal andreform, to provide the ethos for the enactment of communal statutes, and to

22 Howard, Beyond the Written Word, 139.23 San Bernardino of Siena, Savonarola, and more recently Giovanni Dominici.24 Francesco da Castiglione, ‘Vita’. In Sancti Antonini Archiepiscopi Florentini Ordinis Praedicatorum Summa

Theologica, coll. xxii–lxxii, (Verona: Augustinus Caratonius, 1740; repr. Graz: Akedemische-U. Verlagsanstalt,1959), col. lxi: ‘Non enim de universalibus tantum rebus scripsit; verum etiam ad particularia quaequedescendens, ad hunc nostrum vivendi usum et ad singularem quamdam humanae vitae operationem, doctri-nam accommodavit’. Pius II, in his eulogy, wrote: ‘Doctrina theologica emicuit: scripsit plura volumina quaedocti laudant. Praedicator acceptus in populo, quamvis scelerum insectator vehemens; correxit cleri et populimores’. Enea Silvio Piccolomini: Papa Pio II: ‘I Commentarii’, ed. Luigi Totaro (Milan: Adelphi, 1984), 358.

25 Cf. Bernadette Paton, ‘ “Una Città Faticosa: Dominican Preaching and the Defence of the Republic in LateMedieval Siena’, in Trevor Dean and Chris Wickham (eds.), City and Countryside in Late Medieval and RenaissanceItaly (London and Roncerverte: Hambledon Press, 1990), 109–23 at 109.

26 Sancti Antonini Archiepiscopi Florentini Ordinis Praedicatorum Summa Theologica (Verona: Augustinus Carato-nius, 1740; repr. Graz: Akedemische-U. Verlagsanstalt, 1959), Part II, title IX, Chapter XI, section II, col. 1007e,hereafter cited as Antoninus, Summa, II.IX.XI, §II, col. 1007e.

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weld disparate factions into a common civic body.27 In the culture of hearingwhich Florence was, the orations of humanist chancellors and the sermons ofpopular preachers defined, reinforced, and indeed engendered shared valuesamongst citizens.28 Approaching political values in Florence through the lan-guage of the preacher enables the exploration of the moments and contextsin which clergy and laity re-articulated ideas and beliefs to create a fluid ethosthat could confront as well as accommodate developments in the city’s gov-ernance. Such an approach centres the preacher in the public spaces of thecity.29

Fra Antonino’s own account of his times in his chronicle of world history –his Summa historialis – shows the degree to which he was aware of the forces atwork in the city, and the degree to which they threatened Florence’s muchvaunted republican freedom. Words were, for Antonino, effective weapons insuch circumstances. Like his near contemporary, the observant FranciscanBernardino of Siena, he used the pulpit, and the writings that derived from hissermons, to maintain peace between citizens and to promote the city as amoral space.30 Words were, in his view, swords with which he could influencethe ethos of the city. They could preserve all that was implied by libertas.31 Tofashion this ethos he was continually at work shaping a ‘public theology’,drawing on such concepts as the common good, justice and ‘love of neigh-bour’, and arguing for the display of the cardinal virtues that underpin goodgovernment.

These ideas are not new in discourses about polity, and have a historyreaching back to the twelfth century and further into the world of late antiq-uity. Most immediately, Fra Antonino was indebted to Thomistic thought, aswell as to Cicero and Aristotle, both directly and indirectly by way of commen-taries and other sources.32 But novelty of language is not the issue here.Though not without their critics, historians often associated with defining thestudy of the western political tradition, notably J. G. A. Pocock, Quentin

27 Howard, Beyond the Written Word, 87–9.28 Howard, Beyond the Written Word, pp. 79–86. See now idem, ‘Preaching Magnificence in Renaissance

Florence’, 325–69.29 Peter Howard, ‘The Impact of Preaching in Renaissance Florence: Fra Niccolò da Pisa at San Lorenzo’,

Medieval Sermon Studies, 48 (2004), 29–44; and idem, ‘The Aural Space of the Sacred in Renaissance Florence’,in Roger J. Crum and John T. Paoletti (eds.), Renaissance Florence: A Social History, (New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2006), 376–93 (notes: 584–96) at 384–7 (590–92).

30 This point he makes specifically in the section of his Summa that he devotes to preaching, see Antoninus,Summa, III:XVIII:V, col.1030d: one of the types of peace is ‘in civitate inter civem et civem’. For a generaldiscussion see Francesco Bruni, La Città Divisa: Le parti e il bene comune da Dante a Guicciardini (Bologna: IlMulino, 2003), pp. 297–309; more particularly see Polecritti, Preaching Peace in Renaissance Italy, and NiritBen-Aryeh Debby, ‘Jews and Judaism in the Rhetoric of Popular Preachers: The Florentine Sermons of GiovanniDominici (1356–1419) and Bernardino da Siena (1380–1444)’, Jewish History 14 (2000), 175–200, at 181–2 andher Renaissance Florence in the Rhetoric of Two Popular Preachers, 66–8.

31 Peter F. Howard, ‘ “Leoni Superbi”: Florentines, Sant’Antonino and his preaching in the Duomo’, inTimothy Verdon and Annalisa Innocenti (eds.), Atti del VII Centenario di S.Maria del Fiore (Florence: EDIFIR,2001), 495–509.

32 Howard, Beyond the Written Word, 43–51.


Skinner, and more recently Matthew Kempshall, have reminded us of theimportance of the particular ‘linguistic contexts’ of the terminology of politi-cal language, and the settings in which particular political concepts madesense.33 While linguistic contextualism tends to be too paradigmatic, itsmethod can be accommodated within my guiding approach which centres onsermon studies, and an interdisciplinary endeavour that draws together scrip-ture (especially redaction criticism), theology, ritual, along with intellectual,artistic, urban and social history. In recent publications I have sought todemonstrate the way in which Florentine audiences participated in oralculture, and how preachers connected their discourses to the concerns oftheir hearers, acknowledging social realities while at the same time respectingthe intellectual context and the inherited language of the ecclesiastical tradi-tion.34 My interest is in the way language works in a particular milieu andmoment. For the preacher, traditional language had a particular resonanceand could sum up and so make manageable contemporary situations.35 Invari-ably as he climbed up into the pulpit, the preacher was aware of choosing themost appropriate language for the circumstances of the crowd before him,especially in a city where public oratory was regarded as serious business.36

Fra Antonino was educated and later preached within a particularlydynamic intellectual context, where even merchants self-consciously weredetermined that their sons be inducted into a world of new educationalideals.37 His particular intellectual matrix was the one that was evolving inFlorence in the first part of the fifteenth century in general, and in theobservant branch of the Dominicans in particular. He not only had a uniquelibrary at his disposal, but was well placed to understand the anxieties ofFlorence’s citizens in relation to an inherited tradition.38 Fra Antonino, likeother successful preachers, acted as what Paul Gehl calls a cultural translator:

33 See Melvin Richter, ‘Reconstructing the History of Political Languages: Pocock, Skinner, and the Geschich-tliche Grundbegriffe ’, History and Theory, 29 (1990), 38–70; Martin S. Kempshall, The Common Good in Late MedievalPolitical Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). See too Teresa Rupp, ‘Damnation, Individual andCommunity in Remigio dei Girolomi’s De Bono Communi’, History of Political Thought, 21 (2000), 217–36, esp.223–4. For a critique of Skinner and Pocock, see Mark Bevir, ‘The Errors of Linguistic Contextualism’, Historyand Theory, 31 (1992), 276–98, and more recently in the context of the re-evaluation of ‘civic humanism’, seenotably the essays in James Hankins (ed.), Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2000).

34 For appraisals of my approach see Augustine Thompson, ‘From Texts to Preaching: Retrieving theMedieval Sermon as an Event’, in Muessig, Preacher, Sermon and Audience in the Middle Ages, 13–37, at 22 n.45, 23n.55, 24 nn. 57, 59, 25 n. 63, 26 n. 76, 30 n. 90, 33 n. 107; and Patricia Lee Rubin, Images and Identity inFifteenth-Century Florence (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), 348.

35 See Howard, Beyond the Written Word, 71.36 See e.g. Howard, ‘Preaching Magnificence in Renaissance Florence’, 325–6.37 See Giovanni Morelli’s comments in his diary, in Vittorio Branca (ed.), Mercanti Scrittori: Ricordi nella Firenze

tra Medioevo e Rinascimento (Milan: Rusconi, 1986), 101–339, at 294.38 See Peter Howard, ‘“Doctrine, When Preached, is Entirely Civic”: the Generation of Public Theology and

the Role of the Studia in Renaissance Florence’, in Constant Mews and John Crossley (eds.), Communities ofLearning, Religious Diversity, and the Written Record 1085–1453 (Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming).

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he distilled, reclassified, and concretized ideas circulating in learned circles.39

The moral framework within which political (or more accurately, theological)discourse developed in Florence was a broad one and reached back to thedifficult and exciting days when the government of the secondo popolo wasreforging the social, political, and material fabric of the city.40

To approach political language from the point of view of sermon studiestherefore emphasizes the local and particular nature of the public theologythat was forged in Florence from the 1420s to the 1450s. This was because thekey to effective preaching was always to orchestrate discourses that wouldaddress and shape the moral ethos of the city at any one particular moment.For this reason, treatises on the art of preaching urged preachers to adaptdoctrine to circumstances. In articulating the cardinal virtues underpinninggood governance from the sources available to him, Fra Antonino was apply-ing diverse threads drawn from theological tradition to the particular needsand aspirations of the city’s political, social, and moral life.

II

As a preacher Fra Antonino’s vision of his city was a moral one. He identifiedand explained the sort of virtuous conduct which would promote freedomamongst citizens, and warned against those factors which would threaten it.This vision, however, was not simply abstractly theological; it was grounded ina grasp of the city’s historical and political development. Fra Antonino wasvery aware of the diverse types of polity of the different city-states of Italy, andhow particular in its form of government Florence (along with Siena) was.41

He was aware of the inter-relationship between Florentine identity and thetype of political institutions that had developed over the course of nearly twocenturies, a history which, he would observe, revealed the degree to which thecity was ‘most prudent in ruling [its] people and in establishing laws’.42 FraAntonino continued to articulate the ideals of the common good and repub-lican freedom, and defined what was in the public interest in a way that wasboth consonant with the expectations of the crowds congregated around hispulpit, but also aimed at sharpening their views. From the pulpit he had the

39 Paul F. Gehl, ‘Preachers, Teachers, and Translators: The Social Meaning of Language Study in TrecentoTuscany’, Viator, 25 (1994), 289–323, at 294.

40 For a development of this idea, see Howard, ‘Aural Spaces of the Sacred’, 384–93.41 Antoninus, Summa III:III:IV, col. 189b: ‘In diversis regionibus sunt diversi modi principandi et dominandi.

Nam regna reguntur per unum regem, aliqua etiam dominia per unum ducem, marchionem, comitem ethuiusmodi reguntur. Aliquae civitates et dominia sunt, quae reguntur plures et ad tempus, qui dicuntur dominipriores vel antiani vel consules et huiusmodi, qui etiam ad disponendum de factis comitatem concernentibushabent secum collegas sub diversis nominibus officiorum, ut in Italia, Florenitae, Senis’. He goes on to discusspapal vicariates in the Romagna, Ferrara and ‘suchlike’, before turning to the ‘abuses’ of those officials who failto serve the civic states.

42 Summa historialis, 298rb: ‘in regendis populis et condendis iuribus prudentissima’, quoted in Howard,Beyond the Written Word, 254.


opportunity to keep before the populace the ideals and philosophies whichshaped the laws and regulations underpinning government, compiled overcenturies and which lay buried in folios in the Florentine chancery.43 Forexample, in a chapter of his Summa theologica devoted to the assorted vices ofrulers and officials, he shows just how aware he was of emerging pressures –including intimidation and the disclosure of votes – which were threateningthe freedom of Florence’s governmental councils. The powerful were sinning‘both against the honesty which constituted good citizenship and againstliberty’.44

Recent scholarship has revealed how unstable the Florentine notion offreedom was.45 The idea of libertas was at the ‘the crossroads of various learneddiscursive traditions’ (to quote Selena Ferente’s felicitous phrase).46 In thenorth and in the earlier communal period, libertas was ‘liberty as a republicanform of self-government, whose characteristics and limits were unstable andnegotiable but which presupposed the presence, however distant and invis-ible, of the emperor’.47 By contrast, Florence asserted her own sovereignty,free from the tutelage of empire. This view of Florentine libertas had as its mosteloquent proponent Leonardo Bruni. For him, Florence was a foundation ofRepublican Rome, and therefore came before and outside the RomanEmpire.48 Fra Antonino strongly reflects both this view, as we shall see, andperhaps his own friendship with Bruni, but more likely a Dominican traditionfrom Remigio de’ Girolami through Giovanni Dominici, or indeed, a conflu-ence of both.49

For a preacher like Fra Antonino, the quotation of the epimythium of thefable attributed to Aesop – ‘You cannot sell liberty for all the gold there is’ –was intended to achieve more than a simple iteration of a point about libertyas integral to the affairs of men. As a skilled preacher who wrote a handbookon the subject, he knew that, for his hearers (and readers), just as the quota-tion of a line of scripture could evoke the entire text and context, so too thequotation of this line from Aesop could bring to mind the entire fable.50 Hewas well aware of the cultural codes of his community and that the single line

43 Cf. Felix Gilbert, ‘The Venetian Constitution in Florentine Political Thought’, in Nicolai Rubinstein, (ed.),Florentine Studies: Politics and Society in Renaissance Florence (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), 463–500 at 464.

44 Antoninus, Summa III:III:IV, col. 189e: ‘Item solent excedere in hoc, quod non permittunt consilia esselibera, sed per violentiam extorquent, et per multam importunitatem facientes fabas ostendere. Sed et ipsigraviter peccant contra honestatem agentes bonae civilitatis et contra libertatem . . .’.

45 See Alison Brown, ‘De-masking Renaissance Republicanism’, in Hankins, Renaissance Civic Humanism,179–99, at 179–90.

46 Serena Ferente, ‘Guelfs! Factions, Liberty and Sovereignty: Inquiries About the Quattrocento’, History ofPolitical Thought, 28 (2007), 571–98, at 573.

47 Ferente, ‘Guelfs! Factions, Liberty and Sovereignty’, 591.48 Ferente, ‘Guelfs! Factions, Liberty and Sovereignty’, 591. See also Gary Ianziti, ‘Challenging Chronicles:

Leonardo Bruni’s History of the Florentine People’, in Sharon Dale, Alison Williams Lewin, and Duane J. Osheim(eds.), Chronicling History: Chroniclers and Historians in Medieval and Renaissance Italy (University Park: ThePennsylvania State University Press, 2007), 249–72, esp. 254–256.

49 Debby, ‘Political Views in the Preaching of Giovanni Dominici’, 34.50 On this idea see D’Avray, Death and the Prince, 187; Howard, ‘“The womb of memory”’, 199–205.

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could act as a mnemonic to recall a narrative that was rooted in the childhoodexperience of many Florentine men. The version of Aesop’s fables on whichAntonino drew was one that was the staple of the Latin curriculum at Floren-tine grammar schools.51 Indeed, its use was promoted by Fra Antonino’smentor, the reformer Giovanni Dominici,52 and Antonino himself commentson the importance of such honest fables and parables, especially Aesop’s, inthe moral development of young Florentine citizens.53 To this end, vernacularversions of the fables abounded, and so their audience extended to thedomestic realm. Thus the fable of The Dog, the Wolf and the Collar was one whichhe would have expected to be well known to his intended addressees.

By embedding the fable’s moral point in a discussion of earthly goods,which he pursues in his Summa theologica, Antonino was encouraging what wewould call a political hearing-reading of the text. He reviews the notion ofearthly goods by considering the connection between wealth, honour, andpower in the context of the ‘injury of mortal sin’ (De nocumentis peccati mortalis)and the different types of good. What he says about worldly goods is funda-mental to his understanding of the role of citizens in the community. Worldlygoods can be used instrumentally: by this he means that wealth, honour, andpower provide the framework and opportunity for accomplishing good works.Aristotle is his authority for this belief in the function of these goods, namely‘riches or the wealth of this world, the procurement of honour or worldlyglory, and the actions of power and freedom in the concerns of men’.54

Fra Antonino develops each of these in the text of his Summa theologica.While the pious use of wealth may merit eternal life,55 the good that comesfrom honour and glory56 is much more important and is much sought after.For instance, for King Solomon ‘a good name [was] better than great riches’.57

Fra Antonino glosses Saint Paul – a text which originally referred to thesensitive issue of support of missionaries of the gospel – to establish hispoint, saying: ‘pious men strive to maintain and augment this good, not for

51 See Robert Black, Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2001), 226–7: ‘the reading of minor authors [Black’s list includes Aesop] continued enthusi-astically into the fifteenth century’. Also Paul F. Gehl, A Moral Art: Grammar, Society, and Culture in TrecentoFlorence (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), 43; and Paul Grendler, Schooling in RenaissanceItaly: Literacy and Learning, 1300–1600 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 111–12.

52 Ibid. (Black), p. 247.53 Antoninus, Summa IV:II:V, §V, col. 59d. For Antonino’s source see below.54 Antoninus, Summa I:VII:III, §I, col. 533c: ‘Et bona quidem temporalia, etsi minima sint respectu aliorum,

tamen bona sunt a Deo: et ut dicit philosophus [Ethica Nichomachea, Bk. 7, 13], organice deserviunt felicitati,idest instrumentaliter, quia sunt tamquam media ad perficiendum aliqua opera virtuosa. Sunt autem hujusmoditripartita: videlicet divitiae seu substantia temporalis, honorificentiae seu gloria mundialis, praesidentiae etlibertas humanalis’.

55 Ibid.: ‘Divitias quidem sive naturales, ut possessiones, animalia victualia et hujusmodi, ac etiam divitiasartificiales, ut pecuniae argenteae, aureae vestes, et hujusmodi, Dominus tribuit, ut mediante earum fidelidispensatione quis sibi mereatur vitam aeternam’.

56 Ibid., col. 533e: ‘Bonum honoris et gloriae multum appetitur’.57 Ibid., citing Proverbs 22:1: ‘Melius est nomen bonum, quam divitiae multae’.


themselves, but for the building up of their neighbour’.58 The generation ofwealth benefits not just the individual, but the community as a whole.

The third good is the one on which he dwells most in this particular passagein his Summa: ‘governance and freedom in the concerns of men’.59 This isunderstood by Antonino to be a special form of good granted by God as aparticipation in his own divine power of governance and ordering of theworld. It is generally the responsibility of those with wealth and power.Antonino is quite explicit about this: it is the responsibility of the rich and thepowerful to make the city magnificent – not only physically, but morally aswell.60 He concedes that whilst power and freedom in relation to the concernsof men is in effect God-given, it can be subverted by sin and lead to all typesof other evils, in particular those which curtail freedom and effectively subjectothers to slavery. To support his view, Fra Antonino draws on an array of OldTestament examples of the Jews in captivity – under the Pharaohs, Nebuchad-nezzar, Balthazar, and Darius – and goes on to assert that ‘liberty has to bereckoned as a fundamental good’.61 He follows on with his authority(unnamed but readily recognized by his hearers as I have explained above):‘For you cannot sell liberty for all the gold that is’.62 Then immediately heopines: ‘By contrast, slavery is the greatest misery, since servitude has beenintroduced by sin’.63

While one cannot always be sure how words were received, in the context ofthe growing power and arrogance of the Medici in the period it could well bethat there is an oblique reference here to the manipulation of the city’s politicalinstitutions and its implications for Florentines’ much-prized republicanfreedom. Here Antonino’s thought has a bearing on the historiography of civichumanism. What he has in mind is (to appropriate into my context the aptphrase of Mikael Hörnqvist) ‘not the positive form of freedom Baron, Rubin-stein, and others have sought to identify with Florentine republicanism.’64 It iswhat Skinner (drawing on Isaiah Berlin) has termed ‘negative liberty’: that is,

58 Antoninus, Summa I:VII:III, §I, col. 533e: ‘Undeque sancti viri hanc conservare et augere nituntur, nonpropter se, sed ad proximorum aedificationem’. The text of St Paul is 1 Corinthians 9:15: ‘bonum est enim mihimagis mori, quam ut gloriam meam quis evacuet’ (‘for it is better for me to die, rather than that any man shouldmake my glory void’).

59 See note 54. Fra Antonino is certainly not naïve, though, in pursuing these discussions; he sees the risks— what was a virtue for Solomon, for instance, was temptation in relation to the Queen of Sheba.

60 Howard, ‘Preaching Magnificence in Renaissance Florence’.61 Antoninus, Summa I:VII:III, §I, col. 534d.62 Ibid., col. 534d: ‘Libertas utique magnum bonum aestimatur. Non enim bene pro toto libertas venditur auro’.

For details of Aesop’s fables according to Walter the Englishmen, see above n.1. Antonino also quotes theepimythium in his differentiation of the types of liberty, in this instance ‘worldly liberty’ (‘libertas mundana seuhumana’) when discussing ‘unrestrained choice’ (liberum arbitrium), Antoninus, Summa I:IV:II, §VIII, col.240b.

63 Ibid: ‘Sicut e contra servitus est maxima miseria, quia per peccatum inducta est servitus’. From the pointof view of a theological reading, this is an arresting statement, since in the classical view servitude is introducedby the sin of the slave; when evil is pursued, bondage results.

64 Hörnqvist, ‘The Two Myths of Civic Humanism’, 116.

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freedom from arbitrary power and corruption.65 Public theology was groundedin, and shaped by, particular experience. Fra Antonino, in his Summa historialis,in a section which he composed himself, shows his awareness of the way in whichCosimo, soon after his return from exile in 1434, was already manipulating theballots for the appointment to offices in the city.66 The reference to the wolf, thedog and the collar implied by the quotation of the epimythium from Aesop inAntonino’s discussion of power and freedom in the affairs of men, could wellhave inferred a referent – Cosimo and his political activity – unspoken, yetunderstood by all. The versicle from the fable has the effect of translating thetheological notion relating sin and servitude into the civic realm, and reinforc-ing the message that political manipulation is contrary to freedom since itreveals the failure of those who rule to exercise virtue.

III

Fra Antonino was much more explicit about the importance of citizens actingin the public interest in a sermon which he preached a few years earlier, in1427. On the third Sunday of that Lent he preached on the issue of factionand division in the city:

‘Every kingdom divided against itself, shall be brought to desolation’ (Luke 11:17)and ‘the kingdom of God is justice, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit’ (Rom 14:17).Whence, with a view to gaining this kingdom, virtues, which are from the HolySpirit, are required. [. . .] Chrysostom says that ‘nothing on earth is stronger thanthe kingdom [regno] and yet it perished through altercation’.And what he is talking about is clear. For Rome had a universal dominion that lasteda long time, at least for as long as Romans looked to the common good [bonumcommune]. But when the citizens began to look for their own personal good [bonumparticulare] that city went from bad to worse, to the extent that it is now almostnothing.67

65 Quentin Skinner, ‘The Republican Ideal of Political Liberty’, in Bock, Machiavelli and Republicanism,293–309, esp. 304–06.

66 ‘Et qui fuerant in priori mutatione relegationis Cosme admoniti, id est ab officiis remoti, in secundapostea, revocato eo, fuerunt exaltati, ad officia omnia admisssi cum amicis suis’, Antoninus, Summa historialis,272rb; Chroniques de Saint Antonin: Fragments Originaux du Titre XXII (1378–1459), ed. Raoul Morçay (Paris:Libraire Gabalda, 1913), 47–8. See David S. Petersen, ‘An Episcopal Election in Quattrocento Florence’, inJames Ross Sweeney and Stanley Chodorow (eds.), Popes, Teachers, and Canon Lawyers in the Middle Ages (Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 1989), 300–25 at 319.

67 Antoninus, Sermones, 26rb. The social context is even clearer in his summary of his sermons for the Lentenseason, preached on Holy Saturday: ‘There must be no ruptures among you; that is, [there must be no] divisionsand discord in what is attempted in commune [in common] for the honour of God and the good of the republicby clashing with each other, neither by quarrelling over contradictory words about truth, or even for what is truebut in a disorderly manner, nor by brawling as when one strikes or beats another, nor through sedition as whenone family or some other citizen rises up against another because they belong to particular factions’, Antoninus,Sermones, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence, MS Conventi soppressi A.8.1750, 58ra, quoted in Howard,Beyond the Written Word, 136. Antonino also covers this material in his Summa, viz. Antoninus, Summa II:IV:VIII,‘De discordia per modum praedicationis, et ibi de partialitatibus civitatum’, esp. col. 623. This theme amounts


The context that brought the bonum commune and the bonum particulare intosharp focus was slightly different to that of the 1430s and 1440s. In thetroubled year of 1427 the city was filled with faction, division, and anxiety inthe ruling group — a period associated with ‘the rise of the Medici’.68 Both theMedici and the Albizzi factions were in this instance the unspoken objects ofthe discourse, readily identified by hearers.

After discussing the kingdom of ‘home and family’, Fra Antonino devotedthe second section of the sermon to the political and the civil realm. Centralto his discussion is the role of justice and the imperative that citizens strive forthe common good more than their own personal good. He preaches:

The second kingdom is political and civil, and this is unified through right justice.When in this kingdom division is contrived, it is called sedition which is when onepart of the citizenry moves against another, and denotes not only each factionsmiting one another but also the actual preparation for such fighting of one factionagainst the other.69

Justice is central to maintaining and promoting community, and was funda-mental to a polity which had as its constitutional foundation the ‘Ordinancesof Justice’.70 After citing Hugh – most likely Hugh of St Victor (d. 1141) – topoint out that ‘this kingdom is conserved by justice in the same way as thesoul is necessary for governing the body’, he quotes Augustine’s City of God:‘kingdoms without justice are but robber bands enlarged’.71 To Antonino,Augustine ‘shows that without justice it is not possible to safeguard the repub-lic’.72 The sort of justice which he has in mind is distributive justice, whichtakes account of merit and ensures that each citizen is given his right (ius).73

to a civic topos for Florence; see, for example, the pratica of 8 February, 1415, Gene Brucker, The Civic World ofRenaissance Florence (Princeton, 1977), 399.

68 D. V. Kent, The Rise of the Medici (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978).69 Antoninus, Sermones, fol. 27ra: ‘Secundum regnum est politicum et civitale, et hoc est unitum per rectam

iustitiam. In hoc regno invenitur divisio, quae dicitur seditio, quae est cum una pars civitatis movetur contraaliam; et importat non solum percussionem partium invicem sed etiam ipsam praeparationem unius partiscontra aliam ad pugnandum’. For this definition, Antonino cites Aquinas, Summa theologiae 2ae 2ae, q. 42.

70 For a recent discussion of the way in which the degree of adherence to justice was perceived to becoterminous with the city’s fortunes see Teresa Rupp, ‘If You Want Peace, Work for Justice: Dino Compagni’s“Cronica” and the Ordinances of Justice’, in David S. Peterson with Daniel E. Bornstein (ed.). Florence andBeyond: Culture, Society and Politics in Renaissance Italy: Essays in Honour of John M. Najemy (Toronto: Centre forReformation and Renaissance Studies, 2008), 323–37.

71 ‘Hoc regnum conservatur per iustitiam in tantum quantum anima est necessaria ad gubernationemcorporis . . . Remota iustitia quid sunt regna nisi quaedam latrocinia magna’, Antoninus, Sermones, fol. 27ra; forAugustine, Antoninus has in mind, De civitate Dei, iv, 4; for Hugo the reference is not readily traced. Antoninusworks with volumes of Hugh of St Victor, as well as with the Dominican Cardinal Hugo of Saint Cher (d.1263)with regards to both theological and canonical questions. The former Hugh is most likely, though, since it isperhaps drawn from an author such as James of Viterbo (c. 1255 – 1308); see Kempshall, The Common Good,272–3, 277. This seems likely, since James also quotes the aphorism of Augustine about robber bands; see ibid.(Kempshall), 279.

72 ‘Et ibi probat, quod non est possibile conservari rem publicam sine iustitia . . .’, ibid.73 ‘. . . quae stat in dividendo omnia secundum merita et reddendo unicuique ius suum’, ibid.

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He goes on to cite two of Cicero’s principles: ‘the first when citizens strive forthe common good (bonum commune) more than their own; and the secondwhen they do not thus reach out to an opponent because they abandonanother one’.74 The final part of this section continues this moral reflectionand addresses the sort of citizen who is divisive and pursues personal gain, andwho thus ‘may be acting against justice and God’.75 This sort of man, saysAntonino, ‘is in a bad state’, especially if he throws in his lot with ‘a contraryfaction [simply] out of a passion for divisiveness’.76

The use of citation in the oral context has a number of functions: thequotations from Hugh and Augustine serve to authorize Antonino’s views andto connect them to a particular discourse about the nature and self-identity ofthe community which he is addressing. The quotation from Cicero functionssimilarly, but with the added advantage of linking this sermon to the type of civicdiscourse which was emanating from the Palazzo della Signoria, in the piazza ofwhich all citizens assembled every two months for an oration on justice.77 Theuse of such signals served to reassure people’s belief whilst at the same timeprompting them to action. From the point of view of the history of ‘classicalrepublicanism’, Antonino’s sermon underscores two issues: the degree towhich Roman authors, rather than Aristotle, nurtured political debate, andsecondly the continuity rather than dichotomy in scholastic and humanistinspired discourses. The conflation of influences is revealed in Antonino’smarked tendency to identify the classical notion of the res publica with the ideaof the bene commune inherited from the students of Thomas Aquinas.78

IV

Fra Antonino’s sermon for the third Sunday of Lent, quoted in the previoussection, focuses on the virtues required for good governance. What FraAntonino means by this is further revealed at the outset of his Summa theo-logica, the four volumes of which reveal the rich textual underlay of thepreaching tradition in Florence.79 The volumes comprise materials, oftenverbatim from previous and even contemporary authors, which Antoninohimself had found useful for preaching and for the care of souls and which

74 ‘. . . primum quod quaerant cives bonum commune plus quam proprium, secundum quod non itaattendant uni parti, quod deserant aliam’, ibid, likely referring to Cicero, De officiis I, 19, 62.

75 ‘. . . quod faceret contra ius et Deum . . .’, ibid.76 ‘. . . est in malo statu; sic et ille, qui infert male aliis, qui sunt de contraria parte propter passionem sectae’,

ibid.77 Emilio Santini, ‘La Protestatio de Iustitia nella Firenze medicea del sec. XV’, Rinascimento, 10 (1959), 33–106,

at 34–5; Howard, Beyond the Written Word, 81.78 Cf. Paton, ‘ “Una Città Faticosa” ’, 116.79 For the interrelationship between summae of theology and preaching, see Carlo Delcorno, ‘Medieval

Preaching in Italy (1200–1500)’, in Beverly Mayne Kienzle (ed.), The Sermon, (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000),449–559, at 505–08. For the way in which Fra Antonino conceived of his own Summa in relation to preaching,see Howard, Beyond the Written Word, 55–7, 66–72.


could be used by other preachers.80 In the context of ‘benefits conferred onthe soul’ he affirms that the cardinal virtues ‘are necessary for governingcitizens well’. He adopts a quotation from Vincent of Beauvais on practica toframe the discussion.81 Practica is here defined as ‘the inclination to use reasonto bring about civil and celestial happiness, that is, it is about virtuous activitiesthrough which concupiscence, that is the inclination to evil, is regulated andconquered, so that we become like God’.82 His concerns here, then, are moralgoodness and the goals of the community.

His comments about what is required for good governance are framed interms of a range of virtues, ‘prudence, resourcefulness and unbridled justice,the steadfastness of courage, and also the patience to make possible modera-tion’ – in other words, the cardinal virtues. Again, choosing to quote Vincentof Beauvais with an eye to his own Florentine milieu, it is clear that he concurswith the thirteenth-century author that politics is for everyone’s good, espe-cially when one values the administration of a republic – a theme that was atopos of Fra Antonino’s career.83 This idea invokes the complex set of assump-tions underpinning the idea of ‘the common good’, which is an assumedsubject or point of reference on which all the particularities of life in the polisare predicated.84 The notion of the common good was applied to a broadrange of questions that arose in relation to various issues. Therefore practica,Fra Antonino reminds us, is ‘divided into ethics, economics, politics’. In thiscontext, law was reduced to moral philosophy.85 He draws his own conclu-sions, commenting that those who do not have these virtues are not able to

80 For more detail, see Howard, Beyond the Written Word, 32–3, 49.81 Antoninus, Summa I:I:III, §II, col. 32d: ‘Et Cardinales quidem necessariae sunt ad civilitatem humanam

bene gerendam’. Fra Antonino uses a quotation from Vincent of Beauvais on practica to frame the discussion.In his Summa historialis, 344vb, Fra Antonino refers to the ‘preachability’ of Vincent’s treatment of the virtuesand vices in his second volume: ‘suitable for preaching’ (‘aptum ad praedicandum’). See Howard, 1995, 56. Thecatalogue of the Library of San Marco lists the complete works of Vincent of Beauvais (Vincentius Bellovacen-sis): see Berthold L. Ullman and Philip A. Stadter, The Public Library of Renaissance Florence.: Niccolo’ Niccoli, Cosimode’ Medici and the Library of San Marco (Padua: Antenore, 1972), 219. For an introduction to Vincent of Beauvaisand his Speculum maius, see M. Michèle Mulchahey, ‘First the Bow is Bent to Study’: Dominican Education Before 1350(Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1998), 467–70.

82 Antoninus, Summa I:I:III, §II, col. 32d: ‘Practica, quae dicitur a praxis, quod est opus, est agibiliumsecundum rationem in ordine ad felicitatem civilem et supernam, idest de operibus virtuosis, per quaeconcupiscientia, idest inclinatio ad malum regulatur et vincitur, et haec Deo assimilatur’.

83 Antoninus, Summa I:I:III, §II, col. 32d: ‘Politica est, quae reipublicae curam suspiciens . . .’. Morçay, SaintAntonin, 243–69; David Peterson, ‘Archbishop Antoninus: Florence and the Church in the Earlier FifteenthCentury’, (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1985), 144.

84 See e.g. Antoninus, Summa I:I:XVII, §VI, col. 798d: ‘Unde oportet leges humanas esse proportionatas abbonum commune: bonum autem commune constat ex multis; et ideo oportet, quod lex ad multa respiciatsecundum personas, et secundum tempora, et secundum negotia. Constituitur enim communitas et civitas exmultis personis, et ejus bonum per multiplices actiones procuratur’.

85 Antoninus, Summa I:I:III, §II, col. 32d: ‘Practica . . . est agibilium secundum rationem in ordine ad felici-tatem civilem et supernam. . . . Dividitur ergo practica in Ethicam, Œconomicam, et Politicam, et ad hancmoralem philosophiam reducitur scientia juris’. Antonino quotes, almost verbatim, Vincentius Bellovacensis,Summa doctrinale, Bk. 8, dist. 1.

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govern well or to devote themselves appropriately either to a family or to therole of administration: ‘the cardinal virtues are indeed necessary to govern theearthly city well’.86

The way in which the city is governed is fundamental to and focuses Antoni-no’s thought, as becomes clear in the fourth and final volume of his Summatheologica – compiled at the latest by 1450, by which time he was Archbishop ofFlorence (1446–59) – which is devoted to the cardinal virtues, the theologicalvirtues and the gifts of the Holy Spirit. The phrase bonum commune constantlyrecurs and is contextualized freshly in relation not simply to each of thecardinal virtues, but also to the theological virtues as well. In his extendedpreliminary discussion he shows a concern for the interrelationship of all thevirtues. When discussing the virtues in general, he negotiates the variouscategories, not just the cardinal and the theological, but the acquired andinfused, the intellectual and the practical.87 He is also concerned to drawconnections with the categories of Aristotle’s Ethics since they similarly aim toperfect man.88 He is clearly sympathetic to what they mean for a preachercommitted to city life. In one place he is able to say that the virtues spokenabout by Aristotle and other gentiles perfect man insofar as they direct himnot just to his final end but also to ‘human happiness or civil behaviour’.89 Heconcludes his general discussion by treating the connection between thevirtues, arguing that all are linked together in an interdependent way: all aredirected to the good.90 But this ultimate good was constituted in complex waysby the good, the honest and the useful. It could be that Archbishop Antoninowas aware of Leonardo Bruni’s criticism of the scholastic theologians’ use ofAristotle, especially his Ethics which he had translated in 1417.91 After all, he

86 Antoninus, Summa I:I:III, §II, col. 32d: ‘Ex quibus verbis habetur, quod non potest quis seipsum benegubernare, vel familiam, vel civitatem, et recte operari, nisi habeat virtutes. Et Cardinales quidem necessariaesunt ad civilitatem humanam bene gerendam’ (see above n. 81). The cardinal virtues of Plato, then Aristotle,had their credence amongst Christian theologians and canonists because of the concordance with a verse of theOld Testament: ‘And if a man love justice: her labours have great virtues: for she teacheth temperance, andprudence, and justice, and fortitude, which are such things as men can have nothing more profitable in life’(Wisdom 8:7: ’Et si justítiam quis díligit, labores hujus magnas habent virtutes: sobrietatem enim et prudéntiamdocet, et justítiam, et virtutem, quibus utílius nihil est in vita homínibus.).

87 In general see Summa IV:I:I–V, cols. 5a–28a.88 E.g. Antoninus, Summa IV:I:I, §IV, col. 10c: ‘Divisio virtutem alia datur de virtutibus, secundum quod

habent hominem perficere; videlicet quod virtutum aliae sunt intellectuales, aliae morales; aliae theologicae. Deprimo et secundo genere virtutum tractant philosophi gentiles. Undeque philosophus in 2. Ethicorum dicitduplicem esse virtutum: hanc quidem intellectualem, illam vero moralem vocat’.

89 Antoninus, Summa IV:I:I, §II, col. 8e: ‘. . . scilicet, quod perficiunt hominem in ordine ad ultimum finem,sed secundum quid, in quantum perficiunt quoad felicitatem humanam, seu civilem conversationem’.See alsoAntoninus, Summa III:VIII:I, intro., col. 291c, quoted in Howard, Beyond the Written Word, 245.

90 Antoninus, Summa IV:I:V, col. 25a: ‘De connexione virtutum, utrum scilicet omnes sint concatenatae adinvicem, ut una non possit haberi sine altera’.

91 With a philologist’s disdain, Bruni was critical of Grosseteste’s translation of ‘to kalon’ simply as ‘bonum’. SeeKempshall, The Common Good, 72, 347. However, Antonino is clearly aware of the Aristotle’s crucial distinctionbetween what is useful, pleasurable and honourable, see Antoninus, Summa I:XIII:II, §IX, col. 667e: ‘Tertiadistinctio boni est secundum Tullium et Ambrosium et Thomam scilicet quod bonorum aliud utile, aliuddelectabile, aliud honestum’.


was well acquainted with Bruni and drew on his historical writings for hisSumma historialis.92 Moreover, Bruni’s understanding of republican freedom –well expressed in his Laudatio and profoundly influential on Florentine think-ing about civic life in the first half of the Quattrocento – had the cardinalvirtues as its key.93 If my surmise is correct, it is a further indication of thedegree to which Antonino kept abreast of the views that individuals in thegovernment took on the same issues.

When Archbishop Antonino turns from his general discussion of the car-dinal virtues to a treatment of each virtue in turn, his immediate source foreach – hitherto unnoticed and unremarked in the literature on Sant’Antonino – is a work by Henry of Rimini OP (Henricus de Arimino, fl. 1308),the early fourteenth-century prior of the convent of Ss. Giovanni e Paolo inVenice, entitled De quattuor virtutibus cardinalibus ad cives Venetos.94 That schol-ars have yet to notice Antonino’s extensive verbal dependence on Henry isunderstandable. Antonino does not mention Henry in his list of authorities atthe beginning of the Summa theologica, where it is William of Perault (d. 1265)who is singled out as ‘speculator in summa vitiorum et virtutum’. Nor does helist them among the key Dominican authors whom he surveys in his Summahistorialis.95 This is an odd omission since two – Vincent of Beauvais (d. 1264)and William Perault – are noted for their ‘preachable’ treatment of virtuesand vices,96 and Fra Antonino mentions all of his sources and authorities inthis volume which was finished after the completion of his Summa theologica.97

Moreover, Henry’s treatises are not listed in the library of Antonino’s own

92 Chroniques de Saint Antonin, ed. Morçay, xiii. For an introduction to Fra Antonino’s historical writing seeBernard Walker OP, The ‘Chronicles’ of Saint Antoninus: A Study in Historiography (Washington: Catholic Universityof America Press, 1933).

93 Quentin Skinner, ‘Political Philosophy’, in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles B.Schmitt and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 389–452 at 423. This text hasbecome the focus of recent re-examinations of civic humanism, see e.g. Hörnqvist, ‘The Two Myths of CivicHumanism’, 125–32, and Hankins, ‘Rhetoric, History, and Ideologiy: the Civic Panegyrics of Leonardo Bruni’,in Hankins, Renaissance Civic Humanism, 143–78,

94 I consulted Henricus de Arimino OP. De quattuor virtutibus cardinalibus ad cives Venetos, Biblioteca NazionaleCentrale, Florence, MS Conventi soppressi A.7.87. On Henry see Thomas Kaeppeli OP, Scriptores OrdinisPraedicatorum Medii Aevi (Rome: S. Sabina – Istituto Storico Domenicano, 1975), Vol. 2, 153. Carla Casagrande,‘Henricus Ariminensis’, in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, Vol. XLII (1993), 756–7. The most detailed study ofHenry is by Hilary A. Siddons, ‘The “Tractatus de septem vitiis capitalibus” by Henry of Rimini O.P.’, Medioevo,25 (1999–2000) 313–440, at 313–17; eadem, ‘Virtues, Vices and Venice: studies on Henry of Rimini, O.P.’, HilaryA. Siddons. (University College London Ph.D., 2001), esp. 1–13, 141–239; Quentin Skinner, Visions of PoliticsVol. 1. Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 31–5. For a discussion of Henry andVenice, and the way in which this shapes his use of material and emphases, see Siddons, ‘Virtues, Vices andVenice’, 141–3. I discovered Antonino’s reliance on Henry of Rimini just too late to make the necessaryamendments to the relevant paragraphs in my ‘Preaching Magnificence in Renaissance Florence’, RenaissanceQuarterly, 61 (2008), 325–69 at 345–54, which had just gone to press.

95 Antoninus, Summa historialis, 344r–345r.96 Antoninus, Summa historialis, 344vb: Vincent of Beauvais – ‘Aliud morale tractans de vitiis et virtutibus

aptum ad predicandum’ – and fol. 345ra: William Perault (Peraldus) – ‘Hic edidit summam de vitiis et virtutibuspredicatoribus utilem’. On preachability see Howard, Beyond the Written Word, 50–57.

97 Howard, Beyond the Written Word, 31.

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convent of San Marco, though the one on the cardinal virtues was in that ofthe other Dominican convent of Santa Maria Novella.98

That Archbishop Antonino intended to incorporate Henry of Rimini’streatise substantially into his own treatment of the cardinal virtues is indicatedonly briefly a few lines into his section on the cardinal virtue of prudence, intowhich he also subsumes Henry’s overall preface to his exposition.

And that discussion about the cardinal [virtues] is nearly all extracted from thebook which Henry of Rimini of the Order of Preachers composed.99

A reader would normally have expected such a reference to have occurredtowards the end of Archbishop Antonino’s own introduction to ‘the virtuesin general’. While Archbishop Antonino’s verbal dependence on Henry isextensive, he does note that he has not hesitated to amend, abbreviate andadapt this source, as well as add material which he thinks his own pastoraland preaching context requires.100 For example, he begins by excisingHenry’s opening verse from scripture – ‘For we have not here a lasting city,but we seek one that is to come’ (Hebrews 13:14) – the verse which situatesHenry’s treatise clearly within the framework of the city. He amplifiesHenry’s treatment at several points by drawing on other Dominican authorswho were writing after Henry’s death.101 Moreover, he changes Henry’s orderof treatment of the virtues from prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperanceto prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice. Then, when Henry elabo-rates the different types of polity with specific reference to Venice, Arch-bishop Antonino removes these references and pares back the material in away which could be related by hearers and readers to a range of polities,including that of Florence. In particular, he excises the chapter where Henryexpounds the political system of Venice as exemplifying the mixed constitu-tion – the best form of rule – and annexes several other topics under thetheme of justice.102 He also adds several further sections to Henry’s treatmentof temperance, while removing his particular references to dance, plays, and

98 Ullman and Stadter, The Public Library of Renaissance Florence; G. Pomaro, ‘Censimento dei manoscritti dellaBiblioteca di S. Maria Novella’, Memorie Domenicane, n.s. 11 (1980), 325–470 at 350 where the manuscript I usefor this essay (Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence, MS Conventi soppressi A.7.87) is listed.

99 ‘Et tractatus iste de cardinalibus fere totus extractus est de libro, quem fecit Henricus de Arimino ordinispraedicatorum de virtutibus cardinalibus’, Antoninus, Summa IV:II:I, col. 27b.

100 See Antoninus, Summa IV:II:I, col. 27a: ‘Sunt tamen multa addita, ut materia tota exigit de virtutibusannexis istis quattuor. Et quaedam etiam de ipsius quattuor de libro ipso excerpta aliquando abbreviata’.Antonino begins using Henry’s words at col. 27c: ‘Sciendum est, quod virtus humana . . .’. I am preparing astudy on the implications of Fra Antonino’s use of sources for his message to Florentines.

101 For instance, when considering distributive justice, Antonino draws on the gloss of Johannes Andreae (d.1348) and Pierre de la Palu (d. 1342), see Antoninus, Summa IV:V:III, §3, col. 183.

102 Siddons, ‘Virtues, Vices, and Venice’, 251–4, 307–12, 343–64, and David Robey and John Law, ‘TheVenetian Myth and the “De Republica Veneta” of Pier Paolo Vergerio’, in Rinascimento, s. 2, 15 (1975), 3–61 at52–6. The question which neither Law’s and Robey’s nor Siddon’s studies solve is the source of the remarkablechapter on the Venetian constitution which is taken to be a later insertion.


women’s dress which were part of Henry’s experience in late thirteenth-century Venice.103

Why Archbishop Antonino should turn to Henry’s treatise as his principalsource, apart from the reliance on the Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas,is perhaps explained by the nature of the work itself, for even its title, at leastas it appears in some versions of the manuscript, including the one withinthe provenance of Santa Maria Novella (the one to which ArchbishopAntonino perhaps had access), indicates the degree to which Henry’s workwas directed to his urban context and citizens: ‘ad cives Venetos’.104 ThatAntonino might turn to this source is even more understandable in view ofthe contemporary Florentine image of Venice as ‘the realization of a perfectrepublic’.105 Then, as Hilary Siddons points out in her detailed study of histreatises, while Henry clearly had Venice in mind when he wrote his tract onthe cardinal virtues, in view of the variety of material which he addresses, itcould be considered as ‘a mirror of many of the types of citizens’ and there-fore applied more generally to ‘the general phenomenon of communalItaly’.106 Moreover, several versions of the manuscript, including the onefrom Santa Maria Novella, correlate well with Antonino’s preference for‘preachable material’.107 They are organized as sets of lessons (lectiones) andso were readily adapted for use by preachers.108 Furthermore, each sectionends with the sort of illustrative examples (exempla) that were so useful forpreachers.109 The issue is not whether the words are original to Henry ofRimini rather than to Antonino. What is important is that Antonino judgedthe sections he uses to be apposite to the Florence of his day, and that theyprovided the sort of political and moral ethos which he, as a native of thecity, imagined for Florence. Prudent rulers of both cities and kingdoms arethose who seek to foster the bonum commune and who therefore look to broad

103 See Siddons, ‘Virtues, Vices, and Venice’, 335–6.104 Siddons discusses Henry’s use of Aquinas, ‘Virtues, Vices and Venice’, 273–4. For a discussion of Henry

and Venice, and the way in which this shapes his use of material and emphases, see Siddons, ‘Virtues, Vices andVenice’, 141–3. For Antonino’s predilection for Aquinas, see Howard, Beyond the Written Word, 60–61.

105 Gilbert, ‘The Venetian Constitution in Florentine Political Thought’, 465.106 Siddons, ‘Virtues, Vices and Venice’, 280–81.107 On preaching and the circulation of Henry’s treatise see Siddons, ‘Virtues, Vices and Venice’, 274.108 Some editions note: ‘ad conficiendum arengas, collationes et sermones utilissimos’, Casagrande, 757;

Siddons, ‘Virtues, Vices, and Venice’, 146, 147, 157, 221.109 What I emphasize here is Antonino’s capacity to draw on a range of ideas, and to hone them to suit the

particular needs of his Florentine audience, or to be drawn upon by preachers who did not have access to therange of texts that were available to him. Some sections were derived from actual sermons, and the work wassupposed to encompass ‘preachable material’ for use by preachers without access to extensive libraries. SeeHoward, Beyond the Written Word, 30–33, 43–58, 61–4, 66–72, 175–89. As is clear from internal evidence, FraAntonino followed the common practice of the period of turning sermons into treatises and vice versa. SeeStefano Orlandi OP, Bibliografia Antoniniana: Descrizione dei manoscritti della Vita e delle Opere di S. Antonino O.P.Arcivescovo di Firenze, e degli Studi stampati che lo riguardano (Vatican City: Tipografia Polyglotta Vaticana, 1961),xiii. Carlo Delcorno, ‘Medieval Preaching in Italy (12001500)’, in Beverly Mayne Kienzle (ed.), The Sermon,(Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), 449–559 at 505–08.

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interests in the communitas rather than to particular ones.110 In another section,in terms reminiscent of the sermon of 1427, he adopts a passage of Henry ofRimini to warn that once rule descends to tyranny a city is destroyed.111

The text cites the pre-eminent works which constituted the standard medi-eval authorities on morality: Aristotle’s Ethics, Cicero’s De officiis, and August-ine’s City of God, either directly or from Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae,from which Henry had borrowed heavily. From Aristotle comes the notionthat man is naturally a civil and political animal – an idea which comes to thefore contemporaneously with both Henry of Rimini in Venice and Remigiode’ Girolami in Florence in the early fourteenth century.112 Cicero providesinjunctions about the way in which private citizens, not only those native to thecity, but even outsiders (peregrini), come together to form magistracies to rulea republic with an aspiration for the harmony of peace.113 When talking aboutthe contribution of the citizen to his society, Augustine’s metaphors – one of‘a word’ contributing integrally to ‘a speech’ and another of a particular stringof a lute combining distinctively but harmoniously with other strings – serve toproject an astute understanding of the complex interplay of the social strata ofFlorentine society:

So the best administration springs up when there are many people in the city, withthe highest, middle-ranking and humblest, along with other ranks interspersedbetween, and arranged according to appropriate duties.114

110 See generally Antoninus, Summa IV: II: VI, 62–66. Section De prudentia regnativa. Then, Antoninus, SummaIV: II: VI, col. 62e; Henricus, De quattuor virtutibus, 19ra: ‘Prudentia ergo in principe debet esse quaedamcognitio universalis excedens cognitiones singulorum, et se extendens ad bonum commune omnium; debentenim per ejus prudentiam operationes subditorum dirigi in finem debitum. Quum ergo tantum bonum, sicutest directio omnium, et gubernatio boni communis, proveniat ex prudentia praesidentis, diligentur adverten-dum est, ne in regime praeficiatur, qui hac virtute careat’. In footnotes that follow, I cite first the passage in theSumma of Antoninus, followed by the parallel citation in De quattuor virtutibus of Henry. Except where indicatedin my text, the verbal borrowings are direct.

111 Antoninus, Summa IV:II:VI, col. 63a: ‘Ex hoc ulterius sequitur ruina civitatis . . .’; Henricus, De quattuorvirtutibus, 19ra. Cf. Antoninus, Sermones, 26rb, see above.

112 Antoninus, Summa IV:II:VI, §II, col. 65a: ‘omnis homo naturaliter est civilis et politicus’; Henricus, Dequattuor virtutibus, 20va. On Remigio see Cecilia Iannella, ‘Civic Virtues in Dominican Homiletic Literature inTuscany in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries’, Medieval Sermon Studies, 51 (2007), 22–32 at 24–8, and JodiHodge, ’The Virtue of Vice: Preaching the Cardinal Virtues in the Sermons of Remigio dei Girolami, MedievalSermon Studies, 52 (2008), 6–18; Kempshall, The Common Good in Late Medieval Political Thought, 193–338. Forbiographical details, modern views depend on Emilio Panella’s studies of which the key one is ‘Nuova cronologiaremigiana’, in Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, 60 (1990), 145–311. Panella convincingly argues that in Paris,1268–72, Remigio was an ‘uditore di Tommaso d’Aquino’, but cf. Kempshall 294. Skinner is the only scholar toclaim that Henry was also a student of Aquinas, ‘Political Philosophy’, 395–6. Dr Siddons, in our privatecorrespondence, confirms that there is currently no evidence to show that Henry was ever a student at Paris.

113 Antoninus, Summa IV:II:VI, §II, col. 65d: ‘Ex talibus igitur officiis per prudentiam ordinatis consurgitarmonia pacis in republica’; Henricus, De quattuor virtutibus, 19ra.

114 Antoninus, Summa IV:II:VI, §II, col. 65d: ‘. . . quilibet in civitate est sicut una littera in sermone, et sicutuna a chorda in cythara, quae cum bene fuerit cum aliis ordinata, consurgit concentus harmonicus secundumproportionem distinctus. Sic etiam in multis personis in civitate summis mediis et infimis interjectisque aliisordinibus secundum proportionem officiorum ordinatis consurgit optima policia’; Henricus, De quattuor virtu-tibus, 21ra.


This quotation can be taken to accord with Antonino’s understanding of theideals and realities structuring and ordering Florentine society, an understand-ing which coalesces with a recent historiography which emphasizes the ‘verticalsolidarities’ of Florentine social relationships.115 The sentiment underpinningthis passage is again reminiscent of Antonino’s preaching in 1427 when hepreaches in one sermon about the constant desire for upward mobility, and inanother uses a similar image as here: the lute plays best when the strings aretuned.116 He draws on Henry of Rimini to consider the relationship betweenFlorentine lawmakers and the good of the people.117 In pursuing the theme ‘Deprudentia regnativa’ – one which follows on from the traditional concept of thepatriarch guiding the family – he affirms positive law and a normative frame-work within which human law and governance operated. His Summa shows hisastute and self-conscious engagement, through his source, with the interplaybetween divine law, natural law, and human laws. These fundamental lawscould not be abrogated simply by human enactments. It was this ethic whichpreachers kept before citizens, ruler and ruled alike. The consciousness pro-moted by preachers at least ensured that the reality was continually fostered bythe ideal. External attack, like internal sedition, constituted a breach of funda-mental laws, and all that preserved the freedom of citizens within the normativeideal of the bonum commune. This explains why Antonino follows Henry, briefly(‘pauca dicamus’), to include under both prudence and fortitude the defenceof the bonum commune as justifying war.118 Throughout the period during whichAntonino preached and wrote, Florence – as one of the few remaining so-calledrepublics, as he was well aware119 – was almost continually at war, both for its ownsecurity and to expand its territories.120

115 F. W. Kent, ‘Be Loved Rather Than Feared’, in William J. Connell (ed.), Society and Individual inRenaissance Florence (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2002), 13–50.

116 Antoninus, Sermones, 3vb: ‘Sed solum miser homo non est contentus statu suo et conditione sua, inquocumque stata sit. Si enim est infirmus, sanus vult effici; si sanus est, vult effici dives; si dives, sapiens’. SeeHoward, ‘Preaching Magnificence’, 334. For the image of the lute, Antoninus, Sermones, 26rb: ‘Nam citharabene pulsat quando corde sunt concordes’.

117 How Florentine structures evolved, and how they were thought about, is the subject of an impressivehistoriography. For a recent synthesis, see Najemy, A History of Florence, generally, but esp. 20–27, 63–95, 124–50,161–87, 250–97.

118 Antoninus, Summa IV:II:VI, §III, col. 66d–e: ‘Post predicta de quinta specie prudentiae, quae diciturmilitaris aliqua pauca dicamus’; Henricus, De quattuor virtutibus, 21vb. He is also very conscious of how war canbe exploitative, see Antoninus Summa III:III:IV, §VI, cols. 191e–192c and Henricus, De quattuor virtutibus, fol.57vb–58va. Under fortitude: Antoninus, Summa IV:III:I, §II, col. 70d; Henricus, De quattuor virtutibus, 52vb–53ra:‘Bonum autem patriae est quoddam bonum commune civium nulli particulari personae appropriandum, sedab omnibus communiter appetendum; ea autem, quae sunt communia, minus diliguntur, et de eis minor curahabetur, ac per hoc neglecta destruuntur et perduntur. Ad conservationem igitur patriae et bonorum commu-nium necesse est, quod sint in civitate homines virtuosi, viriles, et animo stabiles, bonum commune diligentes,qui neglectis propriis bonis, etiam corporibus, morti se exponant pro conservatione et defensione civitatis. Hocautem facit virtus fortitudinis, quae ad bonum commune defendendum hominem impellit, et quantum ad hocest, ceteris virtutibus excellentior, quia divinior est enim ugnans pro bono communi; unde dicit Ambrosius 1.de offic. Est fortitudo velut ceteris excelsior, quae utilior est in rebus bellicis, in civilibus seu domesticus’.

119 Antoninus, Summa III:III:IV, col. 189b.120 For the implications of this for concepts of liberty see Hörnqvist, ‘The Two Myths of Civic Humanism’.

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Though prudence is given precedence in the order of treatment, justicenonetheless remains central to Fra Antonino’s view of governance and liberty.Justice figures strongly in Antonino’s sermon of 1427, and is emphasized in hisPrologue to Volume Four of his Summa – ‘mirabile in justitia’.121 To maintainthe common good meant that everyone had to be attentive to people’s realworth and rights. Such ‘distributive justice’ precluded divisiveness and self-interest, and aspired to ensure that everyone in the city acted with, not against,God. The ideas and principles which lie behind the sketch he outlined in hissermon are grouped under the cardinal virtue of justice in his Summa. As withthe virtue of prudence, his material on the subject derives from the work ofHenry of Rimini because the sort of language which Henry had used forVenice over a century earlier still had resonance for Antonino’s Florence, andprojected the sort of vision of the city as a communal space which he was keento preserve. Justice regulates one man in relation to another and is integral tothe nature of virtue itself, since it directs the will of man and controls instinc-tive (i.e. natural) desires. Hence, ‘through the rule of law justice regulates forthe common good, not only the act of justice in particular, but the acts of theother virtues as well’,122 since temperance and fortitude similarly revolvearound the common good. And since the whole point of the rule of law incities is peace, it is justice that is necessary to preserve it.123 The social arrange-ments under which justice is applied (the susceptive principle), Antonino,following Henry and quoting Aristotle’s Politics, identifies as the household,the neighbourhood, and the city.124 The words drawn from Aristotle andCicero accord with the structure and sentiment of the Florentine neighbour-hood revealed in recent historiography: contiguous sets of extended house-holds of families – so a city is made up of households, often grouped intoneighbourhoods which themselves often comprised relatives and friends.125

That Antonino follows Henry with a view to his Florentine context is evidentin the next section when he discusses the types of constitution under whichsusceptive justice operates. The strengths and weaknesses of three types ofgovernance are discussed before a fourth possibility is proposed. First, rule byone man, which, while it best corresponds with divine rule can readily descendinto tyranny and so is the least desirable form of constitution.126 Better is

121 See above and Antoninus, Summa IV, Prologus, cols. 5–6.122 Antoninus, Summa IV:V:I, col. 175c: ‘[Ideo enim dicitur generalis, quasi per quamdam caussalitatem

secundum quod] per legis imperium ordinat ad bonum commune, non solum actum justitiae particularis, sedetiam actus aliarum virtutum’.

123 Antoninus, Summa IV:V:III, §V, col. 183 d–e: ‘Finis autem qui intenditur in regimine civitatem, est pax.[. . .] Est ergo justitia necessaria ad pacem civitatis conservandam’; Henricus, De quattuor virtutibus, 24va.

124 Antoninus, Summa IV:V:IV, §III, col. 188e: ‘est triplex communitas, scilicet, domus, vici, civitatis’; Henri-cus, De quattuor virtutibus, 30ra.

125 Antoninus, Summa IV:V:IV, §III, col. 189d; Henricus, De quattuor virtutibus, 30vb; on neighbourhood inFlorence see the pioneering study, D. V. Kent and F. W. Kent, Neighbours and Neighbourhood in RenaissanceFlorence: The District of the Red Lion in the Fifteenth Century, (Locust Valley, NY: J. J. Augustin, 1982).

126 Antoninus, Summa IV:V:IV, §IV, col. 190e–191b; Henricus, De quattuor virtutibus, 31vb.


aristocratic rule which means rule by a few and is better than popular rule:‘For when the leading citizens (optimates) pay close attention to the good ofthe republic, readily (faciliter) coming to agreement as though one, andthrough this the unity of peace in the polity is preserved, and as long as theyagree on the common good, legal observance under their leadership flour-ishes’.127 The third type, popular rule (regimen populi), can operate in line withvirtue, but even so this does not amount to a perfect form of rule since thepopulace is rarely endowed with the prudence that is most required forruling.128

The key issue in evaluating the different types of polity is the degree towhich peace amongst the populace is maintained to the highest degree. Thisis best achieved in a polity based on a mixed constitution, because everyonehas a part in ruling: ‘For thus each person will love the republic more pas-sionately, and observe its laws more zealously’.129 The three forms of consti-tution converge in a mixed one, which embodies the best of all three.130

Insofar as there is power for people to elect leaders (principes) it correspondsto a democracy. Similarly, it corresponds to an aristocracy, in which some ofthe leading men (optimates) rule. At this point where Henry has the phrase‘qui praedicto modo electi potestates habent unum eligendi’ (‘who chosen inthe aforementioned way have powers of electing one’), Antonino substitutes‘qui praedicto modo habent vim eligendi’ (‘who in the aforementioned wayhave the power of electing’) to make the passage suit the Florentine contextinstead of the Venetian.131 Both concur on the final point that the mixedconstitution converges with rule by one ‘insofar as one is chosen from the saidbest, and is placed in command both of them and the people’.132 So whileAntonino is clearly verbally dependant on Henry of Rimini, he is, at the sametime, very much aware of the differences between the Venetian context andhis own, and the types of constitutional arrangements which preserve thecommon good, peace, and therefore the liberty of Florentines. He does notfollow Henry and insert a panegyric to Florence’s polity in place of Henry’s to

127 Antoninus, Summa IV:V:IV, §IV, col. 191c; Henricus, De quattuor virtutibus, 31vb. The Latin ‘optimates’equates well with the Italian term ‘ottimati’ which was used in the period for the leading families whichcomprised the established ruling group.

128 Antoninus, Summa IV:V:IV, §IV, col. 191c–d; Henricus, De quattuor virtutibus, 32ra.129 Antoninus, Summa IV:V:IV, §IV, col. 191d–e; Henricus, De quattuor virtutibus, 32rb: ‘Sic enim unusquisque

avidius rempublicam amaret, et ardentius statuta servaret’.130 Antoninus, Summa IV:V:IV, §IV, col. 191d–e; Henricus, De quattuor virtutibus, 32rb: ‘Si ergo aliqui in

populo sapientiores ab ipso in principes vel praefectos eliguntur, et hi ulterius unum in regem praeficiunt, quitam eis, quam populo praesit, erit iste principatus optimus, quia sub ipso principe sunt aliqui principantessecundum virtutem. Unde in eo omnia regimina conveniunt’.

131 Antoninus, Summa IV:V:IV, §IV, col. 191e; Henricus, De quattuor virtutibus, 32rb: ‘Constat enim ex Democra-tia, idest potestate populi in quantum ad ipsum pertinet electio principum. Item est Aristocratia, in qua aliquioptimates principantur, qui praedicto modo /[Henricus] electi potestates habent unum eligendi /[Antoninus]modo habent vim eligendi’.

132 Antoninus, Summa IV:V:IV, §IV, col. 191e; Henricus, De quattuor virtutibus, 32rb: ‘Item ex regno inquantum unus a praedictis optimatibus electus, tam eis quam populo praeficitur’.

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that of Venice; he simply excises the latter.133 In this way he proffers a moreopen text which can be taken up by other preachers as their particularcontexts and circumstances demand.

It is arguable that Henry’s words were considered by Antonino to be valu-able for his Florentine audience because of the affinity of his language andideas with those inherited from Remigio de’ Girolami and Ptolemy of Lucca.Whether or not, like these two Paris-educated Dominicans, Henry was astudent of Thomas Aquinas, he nonetheless represents the type of urban-based theological thought that was developed by the generation that followedAquinas’s thoroughgoing assimilation of Aristotle’s ideas. While Henry’sworks were certainly disseminated in Italy and more broadly through thenorth of Europe, the incorporation of his treatise on the cardinal virtues intoAntonino’s Summa theologica implies that his thought had an impact andcirculation to a degree hitherto unrecognized by scholars. It places histhought in a particular context and historical moment when the politicaldiscourse which has shaped the western world was being founded.

***

For a modern reader of the Summa theologica, the realization that Fra Antoni-no’s text in the first part of the fourth volume is so dependent on materialwritten by someone else (which, in its turn, was dependent on ThomasAquinas) furnishes an understanding of how authorities could be adapted andre-worked for new situations and new audiences not envisaged by the originalwriter.134 Situated within this context, the verbal acquisitions from anotherpen and time were part of a communicative practice which re-presented wordsand concepts in a way that lent them credibility at a given moment becausethey were immediately identifiable through familiar verbal signs, sanctionedby usage and effective in rendering social circumstances meaningful. Thisessay has sought to establish how a set of texts intertwined in a dynamic way interms of meaning and function in a particular cultural setting, one character-ised by a commitment to republican government (albeit, restricted to an elite)and a supporting set of ideas drawn from classical antiquity.

As a preacher, Fra Antonino eschewed novelty. What he sought were con-nections between the tradition in which he understood himself to be embed-ded and the particular issues confronting his audience, be they actual (fromthe pulpit) or imagined (from the desk, envisaging some future preachingevent). The conflation of influences which informed Antonino’s preaching isrevealed in his tendency to identify the classical notion of the res publica withthe theological ideal of the bene commune. His Summa theologica functioned as

133 Henricus, De quattuor virtutibus, 33ra: ‘venetos ad hoc regimen/ hec a venetorum gens’.134 Here I take a step further the conclusion of Neil Hathaway, ‘Compilatio: From Plagiarism to Compiling’,

Viator, 20 (1989), 19–44, esp. 39–44. Antoninus self-consciously inserts himself into the tradition of thecompiler, and defends himself against possible detractors (as he possibly felt compelled to do in a period whenauthorship was coming into its own), see Howard, Beyond the Written Word, 40–41.


an archive or library of quotable sources which would guarantee the authorityof his message. As a Dominican, his recourse to the likes of Vincent ofBeauvais, or more particularly in relation to the issues of governance of acity-state, Henry of Rimini, assured him of the correctness of his theologicaland moral vision, and its appropriateness for shaping the context in whichthose entrusted to his spiritual care – his Florentines – were born, lived anddied. Indeed, for him and for his Florence, the language of Henry was remi-niscent of that bequeathed to Florence by his contemporary, Remigiode’Girolami, the Dominican prior of Santa Maria Novella who was so powerfula shaper of the Florentine polity in those years after the establishment of thecity’s constitution around the Ordinances of Justice. For Fra Antonino thewords of Henry were authoritative because of their lineage. For Florentines,Fra Antonino, in his turn, had an authority which was institutionally derived –a member of the papally sanctioned observant wing of the Order of Preachers,and later an archbishop. His credibility and status were further enhanced byvirtue not only of his Florentine origins, but also by his reputed saintliness.Moreover, he was able to do things with words because he could establish anethos – a climate of feeling – which inclined his hearers towards certain viewsand actions. As he himself put it: ‘the live voice moves to action more than thedead one’.135 The words of Henry, lifted from the page by Antonino and otherpreachers like him, had particular power to affect people’s beliefs and actionswhen spoken from the pulpit, especially in periods of civic stress.

The line from Walter the Englishman’s version of Aesop’s fable – whichAntonino inserts into his discussions about wealth, honour and power, as wellas liberty – assumes new significance when considered from the perspective ofthe role of the preacher in the period and how sermon texts functioned interms of reception. The wolf in Aesop’s fable forfeited an assured full belly toensure his freedom. The story, heard in context, was anything but benign. InFlorence, during the period when Fra Antonino flourished, citizens enteredinto networks of obligation, not always even-handed or fully reciprocal, inorder to further their self-interest (bonum particulare). Such relationships ofteninhibited their freedom to act, and did not necessarily contribute to theoverall common good of the city. By inserting the epimythium from the fableof the wolf, the dog and the collar, Antonino sparked the imagination of hisaudience and confronted any tendency to pursue such partisan interests witha message about the inherited, Florentine ideals of republican liberty. Thereference to the fable was a sharp reminder of the diminishment that wouldinevitably ensue when wealth, honour and power were not tuned to thebetterment of others.

More than just a Florentine patriot, Fra Antonino was a preacher and‘public theologian’ seeking to ensure that all deeds undertaken by citizens,even startling ones like building magnificent palaces, were motivated not just

135 Quoted Howard, ‘Aural Spaces’, 383.

232 Peter Howard

by self-interest, but above all by the honour of God and the good of therepublic – the common good of all. The ideals of the Republic and thefreedom it enshrined would endure, so long as preachers continued toanimate the political life of Florence and kept the ideals and values of goodgovernance alive in the consciousness of the city’s inhabitants.

Monash University, Australia


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