Cipolla in his ‘Saggio sulle fonti di storia economica europea’ (1988) and P. Cammarosano in his ‘Italia medievale. Struttura e geografia delle fonti scritte’ (1991) have reserved considerable space for the documentation produced and preserved by ecclesiastical and religious bodies, and not only for the period of the Church’s monopoly of writing (e.g. until the 12th century). In most cases these exceptional archival repositories (episcopal curias, monasteries, convents, hospitals or confraternities) preserve sources having to do with real estate and movable wealth: titles of possession, donations, purchases and sales, leases, inventories, and accounting records of all kinds. In some large Italian cities, beginning in the late Middle Ages, many of these religious bodies began to make use (directly or otherwise) of the skills acquired by lay people belonging to the productive classes: merchants, bankers, textile entrepreneurs. Church documentation also evolves qualitatively, and the more attention an entity paid to proper patrimonial administration the more it was inclined to enhance its documentary deposits.
Without the parchments of the archiepiscopal archives of Lucca and the polyptychs of the monasteries of the Po Valley, our knowledge concerning Italian agriculture in the Carolingian age would be much reduced. Diplomatic fonds, inventories and ‘abbey’ chronicles compiled in Staffarda, Nonantola, Vallombrosa, Camaldoli, Farfa, Montecassino, and S. Vincenzo al Volturno, allowed in-depth socio-economic analyses of the Italian rural world in the central centuries of the Middle Ages. Such analysis would be unthinkable if limited to the meagre public and private secular documentation. If we then turn to the late Middle Ages, what emerges is the fundamental role exercised by mendicant monasteries, hospitals, brotherhoods and any other welfare institutions governed by canon law, with a mass of administrative documentation that overflows in the Renaissance age. For the modern age it would be very difficult to unravel the mechanisms of what we now call “micro-credit” without resorting to the substantial fonds left by the Monti di Pietà and assimilated institutions, which moreover were not infrequently employed by governments to support public finance.
With important exceptions, the approach to this heritage of sources has often been functional to the study of economic phenomena in their collective dimension; much less so to the economic history of the Church. Such a hermeneutic is inevitable when one intends to analyse the realities prior to the 13th century, due to the almost virtual cultural and archival monopoly of the ecclesiastical and religious world; it is less so when the periods investigated concern the following centuries, for which the sources produced by the secular world tend to grow quite significantly. Yet all scholars should be aware, at least on a theoretical level, that the administrators of bishoprics, abbeys, convents and hospitals acted on the market ideally by relying on a set of ethical principles and value complexes that could not have been the same as those cultivated by rural aristocracies, let alone those nurtured by manufacturing entrepreneurs or merchant-bankers acting in prominent urban contexts. Instead, the objective at the heart of the project is to valorise the economic-patrimonial documentation preserved by the Church in order to study the producer of this inestimable heritage of sources.
This project, focused on Italy, is in the wake of the most recent investigations aimed at investigating the relationship between the Church and wealth: from a purely economic point of view, but also from a social, juridical, political and cultural one, in a diachronic dimension that goes from the last centuries of the Middle Ages to the 20th century. The areas on which the research group’s investigation will focus will be the following:
– Analysis of the consistency and management criteria of the patrimony of ecclesiastical bodies, religious institutes and “luoghi pii”, through the use of administrative, management and accounting documentation that allows for a profitable comparison with the customary practices of the coeval secular world. This line of investigation will focus on the major urban realities of the peninsula for the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. In addition, special attention will be paid to the relationship between humanistic culture, the religious world and technical knowledge, along the lines of what has recently been initiated by the principal investigator (Tognetti 2020 and 2022).
– Evaluation of the Church’s wealth through the window of document production, creation and preservation of archives. Here, the relationships between heritage, rights, identity and memory will be emphasised. The attention that medieval age ecclesiastical archives, defined by H. Bauthier as “arsenal de l’autorité”, manifested towards the preservation of titles attesting to property and privileges, intensified in the Early Modern age through the recovery of documents, copying but also creating forgeries, in order to fill documentary gaps caused by neglect and calamities. A special focus will be devoted to the policies and activities of recovery, copying and preservation of the papers attesting to the wealth of the Archdiocese of Cagliari between the late Middle Ages and the modern age.
– Analysis of the symbolic references to patrimonial wealth and its management in the value system of religious communities and ecclesiastical bodies. On one hand, proper management as a tool and metaphor for the responsibility of the good shepherd – as well as, on the other hand, the disorder of patrimony as the quintessence of moral corruption. Here, attention will be paid to canonical literature and the self-representation of the Church between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern age. On the other hand, artistic patronage as a vehicle of evangelisation and glorification of the Church in the modern era will be studied in light of the dynamics illuminated by the seminal studies of F. Zeri: the religious rift between Catholicism and Protestantism made the translation of monetary riches into art forms of strong pedagogical relevance within Catholic Europe particularly significant.
– A study of Church property as a key to understanding the relationship between ecclesiastical authorities and secular powers in the modern age up to the season of concordats in 19th century Italy, with its long-term influence on the political debate up to the Concordat of 1929. A question that became neuralgic above all with regard to the role of the mixed (secular and ecclesiastical) commissions that were entrusted with the control over the administration of patrimonial goods owned by the dioceses. With the transition from the pre-unitary states to the Kingdom of Italy, the subject became the object of intense debate, in light of the need to standardise the regulations differently regulated by the concordats signed between the 18th and 19th centuries. The Concordat of 1929 represents a significant caesura with regard to the “Roman Question” also on the level of ecclesiastical property, because it became an element of synthesis on the concrete ground in the relationship between Church and State, after the lengthy discussions of the entire liberal era up to the first post-war period.
One of the qualifying elements of the project consists in being conducted in a programmatically diachronic key, thanks to the synergy of scholars from the medieval, modern and contemporary ages. In fact, given the peculiar institutional and archival situation of the Church’s documentation as an institutional subject of very long duration, the typologies, languages and characters of patrimonial management can only be understood by going back to the oldest practices, often perpetuated for centuries, and therefore a close dialogue between scholars specialising in different eras is indispensable.
