Journal of Medieval History

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Civic religion in late medieval Europe

Andrew Brown

To cite this article: Andrew Brown (2016) Civic religion in late medieval Europe, Journal of
Medieval History, 42:3, 338-356, DOI: 10.1080/03044181.2016.1162729

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JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL HISTORY, 2016
VOL. 42, NO. 3, 338–356
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2016.1162729

Civic religion in late medieval Europe

Andrew Brown
School of Humanities ‒ Sir Geoffrey Peren Building, Massey University, Palmerston North, Manawatu, New
Zealand

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This article reassesses the value of a term that has proved very Received 15 March 2015
durable in late medieval historiography. It identifies three main Accepted 23 June 2015
research clusters using ‘civic religion’ (North American,
KEYWORDS
Francophone and Germanic), and examines inherent problems Civic religion; urban
with the term, particularly its association with ‘civil religion’ and its government; common good;
ambiguity of meaning, at once ‘urban’ (specific to towns) and processions; cults
‘municipal’ (governmental). The term has been applied particularly
to the city-states of northern Italy: the article also looks at three
different cities outside this region, Zaragoza, Bruges and Salisbury,
as case studies to consider the term’s wider applicability. Despite
their differences, this article argues that there were in all of them
common religious practices associated with urban government;
and that ‘civic religion’ does serve as a useful term to classify
these practices as a basis for future research – not as aspects of
advancing ‘civil religion’, but to describe the connections and
elisions that city councils made in sacred terms between
‘municipal’ and ‘urban’ interests.

Introduction
In the early fifteenth century, three city councils from different parts of Europe made the
following decisions. In August 1411, the sworn-men (jurados) of Zaragoza in Aragon
decreed that because of the ‘great and irreparable harm’ to the cosa publica of the city
caused by games and gambling dens, no one in the city was to play games of dice in
public places or in their houses, and that ‘for the public good’ all ‘pimps, rogues and vaga-
bonds’ found playing were to be fined.1 The city council of Salisbury in England, probably
in 1412, chose to add the name of Bishop Robert Hallum to its growing list of city bene-
factors whose souls were to be prayed for by the city assembly.2 In September 1414, the city
treasury of Bruges in Flanders paid out 14 livres parisis to the four mendicant orders of the

CONTACT Andrew Brown A.D.Brown@massey.ac.nz

1
The following abbreviations are used in this paper: AMZ: Zaragoza, Archivo Municipal de Zaragoza; LA: Libros de Actas; LC:
Libro de Cridas; P: Procesos; SB: Stadsarchief Brugge; SCA: Salisbury Cathedral Archive; TNA: Kew, The National Archives;
WRO: Chippenham, Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre.
‘ … por [e]l bien public … qualesquiere alcahuetes, truchones, vagabondos o hombres otros usantes continuada-
ment juegos … ’: AMZ, LC, 1411, ff. 8r–v. The jurados were the main group of around 10 men who served regularly
on the town council.
2
Bishop Hallum confirmed a royal licence for the mayor and community to hold land in mortmain up to the value of £40
given by King Henry IV in 1406, whose name was also added to the benefactor list: SCA, Register Viring, ff. 44r–v. The first
surviving list of benefactors (dating back to c.1360) was made in 1420; new lists were made in 1452 and 1495: WRO, G23/
1, f. 77r; G23/2, ff. 2r, 118r–v.
© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL HISTORY 339

town for sermons preached over the previous year during ‘general processions’ to pray ‘for
peace, rest and for our prince’.3
These decisions – to curb gambling, commemorate souls and initiate processions – are
eclectic but related. They were all decisions that had begun to be made routinely in each of
these cities, and were all concerned with promoting the spiritual welfare of urban inhabi-
tants. In modern historiography they might well be conceptualised as forms of ‘civic reli-
gion’. Part of the purpose of this article is to reassess the value of a term that has proved
remarkably persistent: after half a century of use, and despite criticism, historians continue
to deploy it.4 The term has most frequently been applied to the late medieval town – which
has often been noted as an environment of particular upheaval and unrest.5 Three main
clusters of research, using ‘civic religion’ in varying ways, can be identified: these may
loosely be called the North American, the Francophone and the Germanic. Problematic
questions arise as to how the term might be used, or whether it should be used at all: is
it simply too anachronistic and ambiguous to be of value?
Questions also arise as to where ‘civic religion’ may best be found: the term has been
applied particularly (though not exclusively) to the city-states of northern Italy, and to
some extent to larger towns within the Holy Roman Empire. The antiquity, size and
autonomy of these towns may well set them apart from most others. Since Zaragoza,
Bruges and Salisbury lie outside these regions, they serve as case studies for considering
the term’s wider applicability in more depth. They also usefully represent a variety in
types of town, for they differed in origin, size and degree of independence.6 Zaragoza
boasted a Roman past, Bruges emerged from obscurity as a port in the ninth century,
while Salisbury was a planned settlement, built on episcopal land in 1220. In the fifteenth
century, whereas Salisbury was a small city of around 5000 souls, thriving on the cloth
trade, Zaragoza was middle-sized by European standards with a population of some
25,000, and Bruges was a commercial metropolis, inhabited at its peak by 45,000, that
punched internationally well above its demographic weight. All three had overlords, but
Zaragoza lay under the direct authority of the crown of Aragon, and Bruges was subject
to the counts of Flanders, while Salisbury’s immediate overlord remained its bishop
(despite fruitless petitions to the crown to be recognised as a more autonomous ‘corpor-
ation’). Precise comparisons between these towns and others are hard to make, but can
common religious practices associated with late medieval urban life or government be dis-
cerned nevertheless – and is it helpful to classify them as ‘civic religion’?

3
‘ … pays en ruste en … onsen prinche’: SB, 216, 1413‒14, f. 90r.
4
See the themed volume of the journal Histoire Urbaine 27 (2010): Religion civique: XVe– XVIe siècle; and Patrick Boucheron,
‘Religion civique, religion civile, religion séculière. L’ombre d’un doute’, Revue de Synthèse 134, 6th series, no. 2 (2013):
161–83; and Nicholas Terpstra, ‘Civic Religion’, in The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Christianity, ed. John Arnold (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2014), 148–65.
5
For the crises of late medieval towns in the wake of the Black Death, see, for instance Patrick Boucheron and Denis Menjot,
La ville médiévale. Histoire de l’europe urbaine 2 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2003), especially 335–64.
6
For the following, see María I. Falcón Pérez, ‘Evolución del espacio urbano de Zaragoza: de la Antiguëdad a la Edad Media’,
in El espacio urbano en la Europa medieval, eds. Beatriz Arízaga Bolumburu and Jesús Á. Solórzano Telechea (Logroño:
Instituto de Estudios Riojanos, 2006), 209–44; Elizabeth Crittall, ed., The Victoria History of the Country of Wiltshire, vol.
6 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 68–100; Fanny Street, ‘The Relations of the Bishops and the Citizens of Salisbury
between 1225 and 1612′, Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine 39 (1916): 185–256; Marc Ryckaert, His-
torische stedenatlas van België: Brugge (Brussels: Gemeentekrediet, 1991), 22–41; James M. Murray, Bruges, Cradle of Capit-
alism 1280–1390 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005), 229–58.
340 A. BROWN

Historiography: an overview
Although ‘civic Christianity’ was familiar to North American sociologists, it was first
claimed for a late medieval context by David Herlihy in 1967.7 As a phrase intended to
encompass the key characteristics of religion in fifteenth-century Pistoia, he meant two
things. The first was a kind of piety or set of values, a new social consciousness among
citizens that expressed itself in charitable giving, guild activity and (‘less easy to
explain’, Herlihy wrote, except as a kind of charitable good work) a taste for ‘liturgical
splendor’. These values were linked to a civic humanism, and a new commitment to
the welfare of the civic community.8 Other North American scholars have emphasised
the importance of charity, confraternities and the friars in creating a particular kind of col-
lective religious life in Italian city-states. Weinstein could identify a ‘characteristically civic
set of religious modalities arising out of the special experience of Italian communal life’;9
Terpstra has found civic religion in Bologna to be an amalgam of confraternal values and
observant spirituality;10 while David D’Andrea’s civic Christianity in Treviso is rooted in
hospital foundation and charitable giving.11 But besides a certain kind of piety, Herlihy
also meant (or implied) that civic Christianity was linked with the exercise of municipal
or patrician power. The important elements of Pistoian religion – hospitals, confraternities
and public ceremony – increasingly fell under the purview of the signory, especially in the
wake of the Black Death.12 In Florence too, established civic ceremonies appear to have
expanded in number and scale during the fourteenth century.13 For Weinstein and
Becker, this process was tied to more fundamental developments: an assertion of lay
control over territory traditionally defined as clerical, and a quest by the laity for spiritual
authentication – both forms of ‘secularisation’ and ‘laicisation’.14 Narrower connections
have since been made between ‘civic religion’ and the extension of oligarchical control
within cities.15 Public ceremonies, managed by the ruling bodies, legitimised internal
power structures, and could also validate their control over the surrounding contado.16

7
David Herlihy, Medieval and Renaissance Pistoia (London; Yale University Press, 1967), 241–58.
8
Cf. Hans Baron, ‘Franciscan Poverty and Civic Wealth as Factors in the Rise of Humanistic Thought’, Speculum 13 (1938):
1–37.
9
Donald Weinstein, ‘Critical Issues in the Study of Civic Religion in Renaissance Florence’, in The Pursuit of Holiness in Late
Medieval and Renaissance Religion, eds. Charles Trinkaus and H.A. Oberman (Leiden: Brill, 1974), 265. See also Marvin
B. Becker, ‘Aspects of Lay Piety in Early Renaissance Florence’, in Pursuit of Holiness, eds. Trinkaus and Oberman,
177–99, especially 181.
10
Nicholas Terpstra, Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion in Renaissance Bologna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995), 4–5, 29–30.
11
David M. D’Andrea, Civic Christianity in Renaissance Italy. The Hospital of Treviso, 1400–1530 (Rochester NY: University of
Rochester Press, 2007), 3–5.
12
See also Brian Pullan on ‘civic catholicism’ and ‘state’ control of charitable institutions: ‘The Scuole Grandi of Venice: Some
Further Thoughts’, in idem, Poverty and Charity: Europe, Italy, Venice, 1400–1700 (Aldershot: Variorum, 1994), 295.
13
Richard C. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (New York: Cornell University Press, 1980), especially 217–24,
240–60.
14
Weinstein, ‘Critical Issues’, 267 (referring to R. Trexler’s use of the terms); Becker, ‘Aspects’, 182–4; Augustine Thompson,
Cities of God. The Religion of the Italian Communes 1125–1325 (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2005), 3,
107, 136. For a quizzical take on ‘quasi-secular’ civic commemoration, see Gary Dickson, ‘The 115 Cults of Saints in Later
Medieval and Renaissance Perugia: a Demographic Overview of a Civic Pantheon’, in idem, Religious Enthusiasm in the
Medieval West (Aldershot: Variorum, 2000), 19.
15
Terpstra, Lay Confraternities, 18.
16
For a non-North American contribution to control of the contado, see Giorgio Chittolini, ‘Civic Religion and the Country-
side in Late Medieval Italy’, in City and Countryside in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy: Essays Presented to Philip Jones,
eds. Trevor Dean and Chris Wickham (London: The Hambledon Press, 1990), especially 72–3.
 JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL HISTORY 341

Herlihy closed his discussion of civic Christianity by setting it alongside Jacob Burck-
hardt’s vision of renaissance culture.17 Burckhardt’s paean to the glories of Italian commu-
nal life perhaps lies across the assessment of civic religion as peculiar to the north Italian
city-state. But other influences behind the formulation of civic Christianity were also
important: attention to the civic ethos of communes and the use of rituals to legitimate
political forms was informed by the sociology of Max Weber (which, as we shall see,
was even more influential in Europe). North American scholars were also sensitive to con-
temporary debates in the US on civil religion.18 Gerald Parsons makes explicit the connec-
tion between ‘civic religion’ in late medieval Italy and ‘civil religion’ in modern America in
his studies of Siena in the later middle ages.19 Civic religion in Siena was civil, for certain
religious ceremonies became forms of patriotic celebration. Here, ‘religion’ is defined in a
Durkheimian sense, as a collection of beliefs and ceremonies that gives sacred meaning to
a community.20
The second (and more often cited) notion of ‘civic religion’ emerged from a Franco-
phone context, which was solidified in a book edited in 1995 by André Vauchez.21 His
definition of la religion civique was similar to Weinstein’s: it meant ‘the collection of reli-
gious phenomena – cultic, devotional and institutional – in which civil power plays a
determining role, principally through the action of local and municipal authorities’, and
manifesting itself in the organisation of processions, and control over saints and cults.
It meant also ‘the appropriation of values inherent in religious life by urban powers for
the purposes of legitimation and celebration of public welfare’:22 after all, the idea of
the ‘commune’ even in the twelfth century had essentially been based on a sacred oath
of brotherhood. Like Herlihy, Becker and Weinstein, Vauchez located this civic religion
chiefly in the north Italian city-state (though he dated its appearance there to the thir-
teenth century).23 Other contributors to the 1995 volume did not all encourage the
view that it might be found elsewhere in Europe. Civic forms of religion were retarded
in France by the strong grip of le roi très chrétien, and they were stunted generally in
‘feudal’ northern Europe by bishops and collegiate clergy who suppressed civic autonomy
or dampened the ardour of mendicant spirituality.24
La religion civique was apparently identifiable, however, in fifteenth-century Nurem-
berg.25 Besides the North American and Francophone approaches to the subject, with
17
Herlihy, Pistoia, 268.
18
In particular, see Robert Bellah, ‘Civil Religion in America’, Daedelus 96 (1967): 1–21. Bellah noted Alexis de Tocqueville’s
view (1835) that the first people of British America brought with them ‘a form of Christianity’ best described as a ‘demo-
cratic and republican religion’ (13).
19
Gerald Parsons, Perspectives on Civil Religion (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2002), especially 7; idem, Siena, Civil Religion
and the Sienese (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2004), especially xiv–xvii.
20
Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1915; London: George Allen and Unwin, 1964), especially 225–6.
21
André Vauchez, ed., La religion civique à l’époque médiévale et moderne (chrétieneté et islam) (Rome: École française de
Rome, 1995). But note too the contribution of scholarship in Italian on la religione civica, for instance, Giampaolo Tognetti,
‘La religione civica nell’Italia communale. Primi elementi di un indagine’, La Cultura 22 (1984): 101–27.
22
André Vauchez, ‘Introduction’, in La religion civique, ed. Vauchez, 1–2.
23
André Vauchez, ‘Patronage des saints et religion civique dans l’Italie communale’, in idem, Les laïcs au moyen âge (Paris:
Les éditions du cerf, 1987), 169–86.
24
Bernard Chevalier, ‘La religion civique dans les bonnes villes: sa portée et ses limites. Le cas de Tours’, in La religion
civique, ed. Vauchez, 337–49; Jean-Michel Matz, ‘Le developpement tardif d’une religion civique dans une ville episco-
pale. Les processions à Angers (1450–1550)’, in La religion civique, ed. Vauchez, 251–66; and cf. André Vauchez, ‘After-
word’, in Margherita of Cortona and the Lorenzetti. Sienese Art and the Cult of a Holy Woman in Medieval Tuscany, eds.
Joanna Cannon and André Vauchez (University Park, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 224.
25
Martial Staub, ‘Eucharistie et bien commun. L’économie d’une nouvelle pratique à l’exemple des paroisses de Nuremberg
dans la seconde moitié du XVe siècle: secularisation ou religion civique?’, in La religion civique, ed. Vauchez, 445–70.
342 A. BROWN

their focus on north Italian towns, a third main cluster of research on ‘civic religion’ is
found in scholarship relating to towns in the Holy Roman Empire. Until recently the
term itself has been little used by German-speaking historians, partly because of the diffi-
culty of translating it into German;26 yet a venerable tradition of Germanic scholarship on
medieval towns exists which may be said in retrospect to deal with it in all but name.27
Max Weber in Die Stadt (1921) had already sketched out features of the medieval ‘occi-
dental’ city that are compatible with elements that historians have since identified as
part of civic religion. Weber’s city was a Kulturverband, in which the town-church (Stadt-
kirche) was ruled by a community of burghers that expressed itself through devotion to
civic saints, patronage of a civic church and participation in church celebrations.28 The
idea of the city as a politico-religious association has since informed many studies of
pre-Reformation German towns, amid fresh questions of research for instance on urban
‘identity’ and ‘authority’.29 From the 1990s, four forms of urban identity within the
Empire have been treated in more depth: the cultivation of cults and saints, the use of pro-
cessions, the development of churches with strong ties with town councils (Bürgerkirche),
and the extension of civic government over other town churches and hospitals.30 These
forms map particularly well on to Francophone notions of la religion civique. However,
an additional area of interest to historians of ‘identity’ in German towns – one originally
absent from religion civique – has been the role played by ‘memory’, and in particular by
commemorative foundations. Gert Oexle’s focus on the social context of memory (taking
its cue from Weber’s idea of memory as revealing of social actions)31 encouraged study of
the liturgical foundations made by citizens.32 While some foundations commemorated
events of civic importance, others made by ‘patricians’ promoted their social prestige
and legitimated their hold on power.33 The role of such foundations has been the

26
Bürgerreligion and Zivilreligion are the inexact equivalents. See Pierre Monnet, ‘Pour en finir avec la religion civique?’,
Histoire Urbaine 27 (2010): 107.
27
See Gabriela Signori, ‘Religion civique – patriotisme urbain. Concepts au banc d’essai’, Histoire Urbaine 27 (2010): 9–14.
28
Max Weber, The City, trans. D. Martindale and G. Neuwirth (New York: The Free Press, 1958), 102–3, 105, 109–10. Note
also the work of Hans Peyer on protector saints in north-Italian towns, which informed Vauchez’s treatment of the theme:
Hans C. Peyer, Stadt und Stadtpatron im mittelalterlichen Italien (Zurich: Europa, 1955). For further work on this theme
(outside the ‘Germanic’ tradition), see also Diana Webb, Patrons and Defenders. The Saints in the Italian City-States
(New York: I.B.Tauris, 1996).
29
For ‘authority’, see E. Maschke, ‘“Obrigkeit” im spätmittelalterlichen Speyer und in anderen Städten’, Archiv für Reforma-
tiongeschichte 57 (1966): 7–23; and for its use in studying London, see Frank Rexroth, Deviance and Power in Late Medieval
London, trans. Pamela E. Selwyn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 14–16. On the pre-Reformation city as a
Sakralgemeinschaft, and the process of ‘communalisation’ that explained its path to the Reformation, see Bernd Moeller,
Imperial Cities and the Reformation: Three Essays, eds. and trans. H.C. Erik Midelfort and Mark U. Edwards (Durham, NC:
Labyrinth Press, 1982), 46; and Peter Blickle, Communal Reformation: the Quest for Salvation in Sixteenth-Century Germany,
trans. Thomas Dunlap (London: Humanities Press, 1992), especially 77–88. See also Andrea Löther, Prozessionen in spät-
mittelalterliche Städten (Cologne: Böhlau, 1999), 1–4.
30
See Enno Bünz, ‘Klerus und Bürger. Die Bedeutung der Kirche für die Identität Deutscher Städte im Spätmittelalter’, in
Aspetti e componenti dell’identità urbana in Italia e in Germania (secoli XIV–XVI), eds. Giorgio Chittolini and Peter Johanek
(Bologna: Duncker & Humblot, 2003), 351–89.
31
Otto G. Oexle, Memoria als Kultur (Gottingen: Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte, 1995), 9–78
(12). See too Michael Borgolte, ‘Die Stiftungen des Mittelalters in rechts- und sozialhistorischer Sicht’, Zeitschrift de
Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte. Kanonische Abteilung 74 (1988): 71–94.
32
Staub, ‘Eucharistie’, 445–70; Klaus Graf, ‘Erinnerungsfeste in der spätmittelalter Stadt’, in Memoria, communitas, civitas.
Mémoire et conscience urbaines en occident à la fin du moyen âge, eds. Hanno Brand, P. Monnet and M. Staub (Ostfildern:
Thorbecke, 2003), 263–73; Martial Staub, Les paroisses et la cité de Nuremberg en XIIIe siècle à la reforme (Paris: École des
hautes études en sciences sociales, 2003), especially 251–79; Richard C. Kuhn, ‘Les fondations pieuses dans la represen-
tation historique. L’exemple du Grand Livre des Tucher de Nuremberg – 1590′, Histoire Urbaine 27 (2010): 59–74.
33
Olivier Richard, Mémoires bourgeoises. Memoria et identité urbaine à Ratisbonne à la fin du moyen âge (Rennes: Presses
universitaires de Rennes, 2009), 217–86; Stefanie Rüther, Prestige und Herrschaft. Zur Repräsentation der Lübecker Rats-
herren in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit (Cologne: Böhlau, 2003), 57–71.
 JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL HISTORY 343

particular theme of a recent marriage of ‘Francophone’ and ‘Germanic’ approaches in the

journal Histoire Urbaine (2010) under the title La Religion Civique.
The three main clusters of research on civic religion, briefly summarised here, are there-
fore not mutually exclusive; and historians are no longer as wedded to their native tra-
ditions of scholarship as they might once have been. The term has been applied to
towns outside the main areas of study, though less systematically. With regard to
Flemish towns, historiography in Dutch has the same problem as German with finding
an exact equivalent for the term.34 In England, sociological approaches to religious prac-
tices have traditionally been less favoured as over-schematic.35 For Spanish towns, civic
religion has been discussed in relation to royal power, more than in relation to its
urban nature.36 Yet the value of applying the term to any town has first to be reconsidered
in the light of problems thrown up by the term itself.

‘Civic religion’: problems

The difficulties with ‘civic religion’ relate to time, place and meaning. The term is an ana-
chronism: it suggests a distinction between a kind of religion that was lay or secular and
one that was ecclesiastical or clerical – a distinction that did not quite exist in the later
middle ages when all members of Christian society were considered part of the universal
church, even if there were lines drawn between temporal and spiritual swords, sacred and
profane places, or clergy and laity. When treated as a type of ‘laicisation’ or ‘secularisation’,
the term is also open to the charge of teleology.37 Similar problems surround the equation
of ‘civic’ religion with ‘civil’ religion, and therefore an implied analogy between the med-
ieval town and the Greek polis, Revolutionary France or modern America.38 The secular
patriotism in the US that is said to amount to a ‘religion’ (in a Durkheimian sense) cannot
be transposed easily into the medieval context. The local pride identifiable for instance in
medieval civic processions was ultimately celebrated within ecclesiastical forms. To avoid
these implications, Vauchez described the increasing involvement of town councils in
sacred matters as a process of ‘sacralisation’,39 but this too has troubling implications. It
can suggest a process of encroachment by lay government on clerical, an ‘appropriation’
of the sacred by the laity, or even a ‘transfer of sacrality’ from priests to citizens, and in
confrontational ways.40 The late medieval church was challenged by demands from an
34
For reference to the English term within a book in Dutch, see Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, Om beters wille: rederijkerskamers
en de stedelijke cultuur in de zuidelijke Nederlanden 1400–1650 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008), 208–12.
For a discussion in English, Andrew Brown, Civic Ceremony and Religion in Medieval Bruges c.1300–1520 (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2011); and in French, see Jelle Haemers, ‘L’anniversaire gantois de Marie, duchesse de Bourgogne
(27 mars 1483). Autour de la participation des sujets urbains à un service commémoratif pour une princesse décédée’,
Micrologus 22 (2014): 341–65.
35
For religious practices in English towns, see Gervase Rosser, ‘Urban Culture and the Church 1300–1540′, in The Cambridge
Urban History of Britain, vol. 1: 600–1540, ed. David M. Palliser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 335–69.
The term ‘civic religion’ is used knowingly but in passing (348).
36
Jean-Pierre Barraqué, ‘Entre religión real y religión urbana’, En la España Medieval 31 (2008): 249–74. See also
J. Hadziiossif, ‘L’ange custode de Valence’, in La religion civique, ed. Vauchez, 136–52.
37
See, for instance, the troubled use of the terms by Weinstein (‘Critical Issues’, 265–8); Richard A. Goldthwaite, Wealth and
the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300–1600 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 129, 142. Thompson argues that
‘at no time were communes secular in the modern sense’, but they were ‘secularised’; and the city’s ‘secular’ legislation
was ‘steeped in religious language’ (Cities of God, 107, 123, 136).
38
Boucheron’s article (‘Religion civique’) deals extensively with this issue.
39
Vauchez, ed., La religion civique, 5. See also Goldthwaite, Wealth, 121–3.
40
Monnet, ‘Pour en finir’, 111.
344 A. BROWN

increasingly literate laity, and by the princely erosion of clerical resources, but the inter-
play between clerical and lay authority was complex. The late medieval proliferation of
processions, cults or Mass foundations involved an expansion of sacred territory in
which the clergy were as implicated as the laity. More processions were managed by
town governments, but their forms adopted traditional liturgies and their routes
often followed archaic via sacra set by ecclesiastical precedent.41 Even in Italian city-
states, municipal promotion of a sacred city could take place under the auspices of a
local bishop.42
Besides problems to do with ‘time’, use of ‘civic religion’ begs questions relating to
‘place’. The term is identified as a feature that was most developed in Tuscany and Lom-
bardy, and is associated with the precocious and autonomous nature of cities in these
regions. Yet it sets up debatable distinctions: between a north European ‘feudal’ society
and north Italian ‘urban’ society, between an ‘aristocratic’ form of religion and a ‘civic’
form.43 Townsmen in northern Europe often had more complicated links than their
Italian counterparts with rural landowners and nobles; and some of them became more
‘gentrified’ in the fifteenth century, adopting the chivalric culture of their social
superiors.44 Yet the assumption that Florentine or Venetian elites were less aristocratic
in outlook, and their religious practices therefore more civic, is questionable. The Floren-
tine church underwent a process of ‘aristocratisation’ in the later middle ages,45 and
viewed from a thirteenth-century perspective, Italian communes in the fifteenth century
have seemed more ‘aristocratic’.46 Conversely, in northern Europe, the dominance of
noble elites did not necessarily stifle development of a robust sense of civic identity. Jan
Dumolyn identifies an ‘urban’ discourse or ideology in poems and chronicles penned in
Flemish towns, notwithstanding their use of chivalric language.47 Moreover, the distinc-
tiveness of urban polities in northern Italy can be overstated. The link that Herlihy
made between civic Christianity and civic humanism now appears tenuous: a concern
with charitable giving arguably had less to do with the influence of humanism than it
had with notions of the ‘common good’.48 These were as influential outside the Italian
peninsula as they were within,49 as was the notion that the town itself might be conceived

41
For recent treatment of this, see, for instance, François Bordes, ‘Une perception de l’espace urbain: cortèges officiels et
processions générales à Toulouse du XIVe au XVe siècle’, Mémoires de la Société Archéologique du Midi de la France 64
(2004): 135–53; Miguel Raufast Chico, ‘Itineraris processionals a la Barcelona baixmedieval’, Revista d’Etnologia de Cata-
lunya 29 (2006): 134–46.
42
See the case of Bologna: Terpstra, Lay Confraternities, 19–37.
43
For a comparison of urbanisation in Flanders and Italy: Wim Blockmans, ‘Les pouvoirs publics dans des régions de haute
urbanisation. “Flandre” et “Italie” aux XIVe–XVIe siècles’, in Villes de Flandre et d’Italie (XIIIe – XVIe siècle). Les enseignements
d’une comparison, eds. Élisabeth Crouzet-Pavan and Élodie Lecuppre-Desjardin (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 65–74.
44
For example, in London or Douai: Caroline Barron, ‘Chivalry, Pageantry and Merchant Culture in Medieval London’, in
Heraldry, Pageantry and Social Display in Medieval England, eds. Peter Coss and Maurice Keen (Woodbridge: Boydell
Press, 2002), 219–41; Martha C. Howell, The Marriage Exchange: Property, Social Place, and Gender in Cities of the Low
Countries, 1300–1500 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 185–90.
45
Goldthwaite, Wealth, 127–8; Trexler, Public Life, 504–5; Marica S. Tacconi, ‘Appropriating the Instruments of Worship: the
1512 Medici Restoration and the Florentine Cathedral Choirbooks’, Renaissance Quarterly 56 (2003): 333–76.
46
Thompson, Cities of God, 5.
47
Jan Dumolyn, ‘Les sept portes de Bruges. Le bricolage d’une idéologie urbaine dans le manuscrit de Gruuthuse (début du
15e siècle)’, Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire 88 (2011): 1039–84.
48
See John Henderson, The Renaissance Hospital. Healing the Body and Healing the Soul (London: Yale University Press,
2006), 28–31.
49
Anne-Laure Van Bruaene and Élodie Lecuppre-Desjardin, eds., De bono communi. The Discourse and Practice of the
Common Good in the European City (13th–16th C.) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010).
 JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL HISTORY 345

as a sacred body.50 The implicit connection between urban autonomy and civic religion
has also become less certain. Venice and Florence were sovereign, but towns in their
thrall were apparently capable of developing their own sense of urban identity.51
Outside northern Italy, princely power could also be assimilated to some extent into
local civic traditions and appropriated for local ends.52 In any case, regardless of princely
authority, the forms and capacities of urban government show similar development in
many regions of late medieval Europe, even if many of them began earlier in northern
Italy or were strongest in larger towns: the expansion of civil bureaucracies,53 and the
municipal management of public works, urban space, charity and sanitation,54 were all
features of most civic governments by the fifteenth century. As we shall see, they were
also connected with religious values and practices that were promoted by urban govern-
ments in Italy and elsewhere.
The third problem with ‘civic religion’ relates to its ambiguity of meaning. ‘Civic’ can
mean ‘urban’ (specific to towns) or ‘municipal’ (governmental): Herlihy meant both a kind
of piety peculiar to towns and one subject to signorial direction. But the two components
of the term do not always complement one another. The range of religious phenomena
that historians have discerned in late medieval urban society is not explainable solely by
a narrow focus on the development of town government.55 The success of observant spiri-
tuality in north Italian towns, the progress of brothers and sisters of the ‘common life’ in
Dutch and Rhineland towns, the proliferation of masses or fraternities in all regions – in
short, the multiple forms of religious life – have been explained in divergent ways.56 ‘Civic
religion’ seems too specific a phrase to encompass such a multiplicity of urban devotional
experiences. Yet to emphasise the ‘municipal’ in ‘civic religion’ creates other difficulties and
contradictions. As an aspect of municipal or governmental control, ‘civic religion’ was in
the hands of the few and thus less than ‘civic’ in the communal sense of the word. In
general, full citizenship was for the privileged, and membership of town councils was

50
See, for instance, Keith D. Lilley, City and Cosmos: the Medieval World in Urban Form (London: Reaktion Books, 2009),
131–84.
51
See the case of Treviso, according to D’Andrea, Civic Christianity, 38, 148. For Brescia, where local civic ‘identity’ thrived
despite Venetian domination, see Stephen D. Bowd, Venice’s Most Loyal City. Civic Identity in Renaissance Brescia (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 232–3; ‘civic control of religion’ was part of this sense of identity (105–6).
52
See, for instance, in Aragon, Barraqué, ‘Entre religión real’, 249–74.
53
For the growth and specialisation of civic bureaucracies in England or the Low Countries, see Caroline M. Barron, London
in the Later Middle Ages. Government and People 1200–1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 173–98; Arie van
Steensel, ‘The Emergence of an Administrative Apparatus in the Dutch Towns of Haarlem and Leiden During the Late
Middle Ages and the Early Modern Periods, circa 1430–1570′, in Serving the Urban Community. The Rise of Public Facilities
in the Low Countries, eds. Manon van der Heijden and others (Amsterdam: Askant Academic Publishers, 2009), 42–61.
54
Municipal management of urban space was precocious in Italy, but for similar later developments in the Low Countries,
see contributions in Shaping Urban Identity, eds. Marc Boone and Peter Stabel (Leuven: Garant Publishers, 2000). For
control of sanitation in Italy, see for instance (in fourteenth-century Bologna), Guy Geltner, ‘Finding Matter Out of
Place: Bologna’s fango (“dirt”) Notary in the History of Premodern Health’, in The Far-Sighted Gaze of Capital Cities.
Essays in Honour of Francesca Bocchi, eds. Rosa Smurra, H. Huben and M. Ghizzoni (Rome: Viella, 2014), 307–21; and
for England, Carol Rawcliffe, Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities (Woodbridge:
Boydell Press, 2013).
55
Jörg Oberste, ‘Gibt es eine urbane Religiosität des Mittelalters?’, in Städische Kulte im Mittelalte, eds. Susanne Ehrich and
Jörg Oberste (Regensburg: Schnell und Steiner, 2010), 15–34.
56
See, for instance, on a ‘cult of remembrance’ which had little to do with ‘civic Christianity’, Sam K. Cohn, The Cult of
Remembrance and the Black Death. Six Renaissance Cities in Central Italy (London: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1992), 38–65; on observant reform, Terpstra, Lay Confraternities, 19–37; Dickson, ‘115 Cults’; on spiritual concerns and
lay literacy behind the ‘modern devotion’, John H. Van Engen, Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life. The Devotio
Moderna and the World of the Later Middle Ages (University Park, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press 2008), 55–6,
305–12.
346 A. BROWN

restricted. Thus, elements regarded as typical of ‘civic’ religion in its municipal sense – the offi-
cial promotion of city-wide processions, charitable institutions and commemorative Masses –
might reasonably be viewed as vehicles not of common but of sectional interest. Moreover, the
interests of leading town councillors were perhaps not always ‘municipal’. The sources of their
social power could lie well beyond the holding of civic office, and their loyalties were multiple.
Devotional choices made in their wills, for instance, reveal attachments not just to their social
and political equals but also to their families, neighbourhoods, parishes or guilds – thereby
dissipating the sense of solidarity that might have bound them together, as well as diluting
the strength of their commitment to the town as a whole.57
Yet there are more productive ways to approach the ambiguity of the phrase ‘civic reli-
gion’. The potential disjuncture between the narrow interests of municipal leaders and the
wider interests of the city and its inhabitants was one that was acutely felt in late medieval
Europe. In the wake of demographic crisis, many urban rulers were faced with greater social
upheaval and challenges to their authority.58 Their religious practices could become part of
their efforts to resolve such tensions. Even so, their efforts were also the product of longer-
term developments: the many ways in which city councils expanded their authority over
urban space and its inhabitants often drew from aspects of municipal government that
inherently carried spiritual meaning. As we shall see, ‘civic religion’, cut loose from an
association with ‘civil’ or ‘secular’ religion, is a useful term to describe the nature of munici-
pal attempts to develop the sacred potential of their authority, and not just within north
Italian city-states. The examples of Zaragoza, Bruges and Salisbury will illustrate these pro-
cesses in more depth: in claiming the authority to orchestrate processions, supervise charity
and order street life, city councils could claim to rule for a sacred common good.

Zaragoza, Bruges and Salisbury: religious practices of urban governments

The cities in question differed considerably in terms of origin, size and degree of autonomy;
and survival of relevant evidence within them is uneven (as well as being typically later than
for north-Italian towns). Salisbury has a collection of wills that dates back to the late thir-
teenth century and town-council ‘minutes’ that begin at the end of the fourteenth century,
but only a handful of fifteenth-century civic accounts.59 Relatively few wills survive for
Bruges’ citizens, systematic civic decrees date only from 1491, but a fullish series of town
accounts survives from 1280, as well as a rich record of ecclesiastical foundations.60 Evidence
for municipal activity is patchy for Zaragoza before 1406, but thereafter a series of cridas
(decrees) and some detailed council minutes and accounts survive from 1439.61
57
Jacques Chiffoleau, ‘Note sur le polycentrisme religieux urbain à la fin du moyen âge’, in Religion et société urbaine au
moyen âge, eds. Patrick Boucheron and Jacques Chiffoleau (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2000), 227–52; Cécile Caby,
‘Religion urbaine et religion civique en Italie au moyen âge. Lieux, acteurs, pratiques’, in Villes de Flandre, ed. Crouzet-
Pavan, 105–20; Signori, ‘Religion civique’, 9–14, 20.
58
Boucheron and Menjot, La ville médiévale, especially 354.
59
There are two city ‘minute-books’ (WRO, G23/1/1 and 2) – for the first (slightly abbreviated) see David R. Carr, ed., The
First General Entry Book of the City of Salisbury. Wiltshire Record Society 54 (Trowbridge: Wiltshire Record Society, 2001);
chamberlains’ accounts (WRO, G23/1/44); 360 wills (from 1270–1547) survive from collections of deeds – particularly from
the Domesday books (WRO, G23/1/212–15), and from bishops’ registers for the diocese of Salisbury (at WRO) and the
Prerogative Court of Canterbury (TNA).
60
Town accounts 1280–1500: SB: 216 (1280–1500); 96 Hallegeboden, i. The most important series of ecclesiastical records
come from St Donatian’s church in the bishops’ archive, Bruges.
61
AMZ: LC (Serie Libras de cridas o pregones PRE 01–04); Libros de Actas (LA) (L. A. 00001–12); accessible online at www.
zaragoza.es/ciudad/usic/ (Fondos digitalizados). Also trial cases involving the city council from 1416: AMZ, P, 0001–0158.
 JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL HISTORY 347

There were similarities, though, in the way these cities were governed. As elsewhere, all
three cities experienced significant threats to urban order and municipal authority in the
later middle ages,62 as well as changes to urban administration. Town councils varied in
type, size and social composition: larger ones representing the wider citizen body could
still be assembled, while the smaller councils dealing with regular business, even though
dominated by elite groups, could have a rapid turn-over of personnel, following elections
of representatives in wards and parishes, or by craft guilds.63 However, one fairly common
trend in the fourteenth century is the clearer emergence of an inner ring of councillors as
the most active body in urban government.64 In Salisbury, a group of 24 councillors
(sometimes meeting with a larger group of 48) is first detectable in the late fourteenth
century.65 In Zaragoza there is evidence for a similar trend towards power being
wielded by an inner group of jurados dominated by a smaller number of families.66 In
Bruges from the late fourteenth century, families from a commercial elite increasingly
monopolised the two benches of magistrates, aldermen and councillors, each with 13
members, although the pressure to include guildsmen or the ‘middling sort’ of citizen
within the consultative processes of government remained significant.67
These inner groups by no means always presented a united front: quarrels, tensions and
factions within them could seriously disrupt civic government.68 Nevertheless, they all
sought in a number of ways to strengthen the sacred character of their authority as a
body. Joining the ranks of civic magistrates often meant simultaneously joining a religious
fraternity. In Salisbury, a ‘guild merchant’ of all burgesses had existed by 1306, but by the
1370s another guild had appeared, dedicated to St George, which had specific ties to city
62
Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers, ‘Patterns of Urban Rebellion in Medieval Flanders’, Journal of Medieval History 31 (2005):
369–93; Jean Pierre Barraqué, Saragosse à la fin du moyen âge. Une ville sous influence (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998), 113–15,
365–400; John N. Hare, ‘The Wiltshire Risings of 1450: Political and Economic Discontent in Mid-Fifteenth-Century
England’, Southern History 4 (1982): 13–31.
63
In Zaragoza, parishes formed the basis of elections to the ranks of jurados: S. Lozano Gracia, ‘Las parroquias y el poder
urbano en Zaragoza durante los siglos XIV y XV’, En la España Medieval 29 (2006): 135–51. In Bruges, craft-guild represen-
tation in civic government had been secured by 1304, and a system of election firmly settled in 1361: Murray, Bruges, 17.
Salisbury councillors came from elections at ward level: Carr, ed., General Entry Book, xv–xxii.
64
For the various permutations, see David Nicholas, The Later Medieval City 1300–1500 (London: Longman, 1997), 141‒50.
For arguments that greater polarisation of civic society and stronger growth of oligarchy took place in the fifteenth
century, see (for England), James Lee, ‘Urban Policy and Urban Political Culture: Henry VII and his Towns’, Bulletin of
the Institute of Historical Research 82 (2009): 493‒510; and for the Low Countries, Peter Stabel, ‘Guilds in Late Medieval
Flanders: Myths and Realities of Guild Life in an Export-Driven Environment’, Journal of Medieval History 30 (2004): 187‒
212.
65
David R. Carr, ‘The Problem of Urban Patriciates: Office Holders in Fifteenth-Century Salisbury’, Wiltshire Archaeological
and Natural History Magazine 83 (1990): 118–35. For decrees on liveries that were to distinguish the mayor from other
councillors, and the 24 from the 48, see WRO, G23/1/1, ff. 50r (1413), 92v (1428); and Carr, ed., General Entry Book, xix.
66
Barraqué, Saragosse, 34–6, 150–8; María I. Falcón Pérez, ‘El patriciado urbano de Zaragoza y la actuación reformista de
Fernando II en el gobierno municipal’, in Aragón en la Edad Media. 2 Estudios de economía y sociedad, siglos XII al XV
(Zaragoza: Universidad de Zaragoza, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Departamento de Historia Medieval, 1979),
245–98. For a social fluidity after the Black Death, and a blurring of distinction between ‘patrician’ and ‘guild’ in Zaragoza,
see Barraqué, Saragosse, 17–39, 350–3.
67
K. Vanhaverbeke, ‘De reële machtstructuren binnen het stadsbestuur van Brugge in de periode 1375–1407. Verslag van
een prosopografische studie’, Annales de la Société d’Émulation de Bruges 135 (1998): 3–54; Christian D. Liddy and Jelle
Haemers, ‘Popular Politics in the Late Medieval City: York and Bruges’, English Historical Review 128 (2013): 775–7.
68
For factions in Zaragoza, and their connections with nobles and the royal court, see Jean-Pierre Barraqué, ‘La ville et la
cour’, e-Spania 8 (2009). See also Rafael Narbona Vizcaíno, ‘Vida pública y conflictividad urbana en los reinos hispánicos
(XIV–XV)’, in Las sociedades urbanas en la España medieval. XXIX Semana de estudios medievales, 15 a 19 de julio de 2002,
eds. Juan Ignacio Ruiz de la Peña Solar and others (Pamplona: Gobierno de Navarra, Departamento de Educación y
Cultura, 2003), 541–89. For factions in Bruges (especially 1385–1407), see Jan Dumolyn, De Brugse opstand van 1436–
1438 (Kortrijk-Heule: UGA, Standen en Landen, 1997), 121–35; Jelle Haemers, For the Common Good. State Power and
Urban Revolts in the Reign of Mary of Burgundy (1477–1482) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008). For quarrels among the Salisbury
merchant elite, WRO, G23/1/2, ff. 31r‒v.
348 A. BROWN

councillors, and its own ceremonial trappings.69 As members of the fraternity, but also as
members of the town council, leading townsmen benefited from distinctive services, in
death as well as life. The St George fraternity wore a special livery on annual feast days
and processed to their guild altar in the parish church of St Thomas.70 From the late
1360s, and especially between 1380 and 1420, names of important benefactors of the
city (among them their local bishop Robert Hallum as well as the king), began to be
placed on a bede roll, and were initially commemorated with individual feasts and
obits.71 These services were more tightly hitched to municipal authority after 1480
when the separate obits for each benefactor were amalgamated into three collective
obits to be held in rotation within the three parish churches of the city.72 Similar frater-
nities for town councillors appeared in Bruges and Zaragoza: one in Bruges, dedicated
to the Holy Blood, the city’s principal relic, and exclusive to men who had already been
aldermen, was in existence by 1405.73 In Bruges, moreover, election to the two benches
of the town council began to be marked out by more elaborate liturgical arrangements:
following an endowment for the purpose made by the citizen Jan Waghenare in 1395,
town deputies were to attend a Holy Ghost Mass in St Donatian’s collegiate church on
2 September, the day that the magistracy was renewed, so that ‘grace might be given’
when the new council formed.74
The capacity of all three city councils to extend their authority over citizens was increas-
ing from the fourteenth century, despite threats of disorder. Civil bureaucracies were
expanding in varying degrees.75 The reach of municipal government also extended into
areas that had implications for its sacred authority, for instance into town parishes.
Parish size and number varied considerably between towns, but the links between munici-
pal and parochial administrations appear to have tightened: service as churchwardens was

69
In Salisbury, a ‘guild merchant’ of all the burgesses is referred to in 1306: Carr, ed. General Entry Book, xv; in Zaragoza, a
‘confraternity of merchants’ dedicated to Our Lady of Grace was officially created by James I in 1262: Barraqué, Saragosse,
73.
70
WRO, G23/1/2, f. 56r (1461).
71
Forty-one names were added to the bede roll between c.1360 and 1547, almost half of these between 1380 and 1420.
Some benefactors of the ‘mayor and commonalty’ linked their benefaction with the guild of St George, e.g. the will of
William Baly in 1407: TNA, Prerogative Court of Canterbury, PROB 11, 21 Marche. Andrew D. Brown, Popular Piety in Late
Medieval England. The Diocese of Salisbury 1250–1550 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 162–7.
72
Living members of the 24 had to attend. The profits from each obit endowment were no longer earmarked for individual
obits but were channelled into the common receipts of the civic treasury to fund all three general obits: WRO, G23/1/2,
f. 135v.
73
In Bruges, a ‘hansa’ of merchants had existed at an early date, as well as a guild of hostellers and brokers, but specific
fraternities connected with the magistrates appeared later: Brown, Civic Ceremony, 167. In neither Bruges nor Zaragoza,
however, were there bede rolls similar to the Salisbury city council’s (although the Holy Blood fraternity offered extensive
post-obit services for its members); but for elsewhere see the case of Nuremberg, Kuhn, ‘Les fondations pieuses’, 59–74.
74
‘ … dat god bi ziene gracie … verleenen wille zo de vors[eide] wet te vermakene dat het zii ter gods eere ende ter
zaliche ruste ende payse van den lande van Vlaenderen ende bi special vand der stede van Brugge’: SB, 96: 4,
ff. 161v–163r; 2, ff. 30r–v. In Zaragoza elections came to take place on the feast of the Conception, and special
Masses were certainly paid for by 1439: AMZ, LA, 1439‒40, f. 20r. In Salisbury, elections took place on All Souls’ Day,
but arrangements are less clear. For analogous cases of liturgical procedure in other English and Spanish towns, see Caro-
line Barron, ‘Mass at the Election of the Mayor of London, 1406′, in Medieval Christianity in Practice, ed. Miri Rubin (Prin-
ceton; Princeton University Press, 2009), 333–8; Rafael Narbona Vizcaíno, ‘Ideología y representación cívica en la sociedad
hispánica medieval’, in El món urbà a la corona d’Aragó del 1137 als decrets de nova planta, ed. Salvador Claramunt Rodrí-
guez. 3 vols. (Barcelona: Universtat de Barcelona, 2003), 3: 283; and for German towns, see Dietrich W. Poeck, ‘Rituale der
Ratswahl in westfälischen Städten’, in Vormoderne politische Verfahren, ed. B. Stollberg-Rilinger (Berlin: Duncker &
Humblot, 2001), 207–62.
75
For the increasing number of civic offices, particularly in the fifteenth century, see Carr, ed., General Entry Book, xvii–xxv;
María I. Falcón Pérez, Organización municipal de Zaragoza en el siglo XV (Zaragoza: Universidad de Zaragoza, 1978),
passim. In Bruges, by the end of the fourteenth century, the city treasury had 50 officials on its payroll: SAB, 216.
 JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL HISTORY 349

linked to service on the town council;76 supervision of parish accounts was overseen by
civic officials.77 Jurisdiction over urban property transactions also strengthened municipal
authority over post-obit arrangements in parishes. In Salisbury, the ‘mayor and com-
munity’ took an increasingly active role, from the late fourteenth century onwards, in
the supervision of testamentary bequests.78 But the sacred character of municipal
authority over urban space was developed more explicitly through the ceremonial
association of town magistrates with a civic-wide patron saint or cult. The growth
of annual processions in honour of particular cults (the essential hallmark of ‘civic
religion’ in Italy), was a development common to many European towns from the
end of the thirteenth century.79 In Bruges, an annual procession on Holy Cross
day, first funded by the civic treasury in 1303, probably began in 1304 to carry the
relic of the Holy Blood. Although this relic had reputedly been brought to Bruges
by an earlier count of Flanders, it had already become associated with the rule of
city magistrates; and over the course of the fourteenth century civic sponsorship of
its procession with the involvement of craft guilds was expanded considerably.80 Zar-
agoza’s authorities promoted a cult dedicated to Corpus Christi, though it is not clear
when it first developed as a civic-wide procession.81 By the fifteenth century, councils
in Zaragoza and Bruges (like those in northern Italy) were also able to launch another
kind of procession, making use of other local relics: the ‘general’ procession, sum-
moned with the assistance of local clergy to ask or thank God for grace when occasion
demanded. These processions emerged from ecclesiastical traditions (particularly
Rogatian litanies), but in Bruges, a definite shift towards city-council promotion of
them occurred at the beginning of the fifteenth century. Although they were also
used in the interests of princely power, they were firmly linked to a civic aim to

76
In Zaragoza, election to the council of jurados was directly linked to the town’s 15 parishes. In Bruges, parish and town
administration was not so closely tied, but those who served as churchwarden (kerkmeester) also often went on to serve
on the benches of civic magistrates (as they did in Salisbury).
77
For analysis of this overlap elsewhere (Nuremberg), see Staub, Paroisses, 89–114. Note the ‘muncipalisation’ of church
fabrics in Italy: Patrick Boucheron, ‘À qui appartient la cathédrale? La fabrique et la cité dans l’Italie médiévale’, in Religion
et société, ed. Boucheron, 95–117.
78
Some testators in the early fourteenth century required distributions to be made ‘in the sight of’ the parish priest and the
mayor, even though the process took place in the bishop’s court, e.g. wills made in 1331 and 1348: SCA, Press IV, Box W;
WRO, G23/1/212, ff. 17r–v; but an increasing number asked for distributions to be made at the ‘discretion of the mayor’,
and for bequests to be made directly to the ‘mayor and community’ for the ‘business’ of the city, or for mitigation of
tallages paid to the crown, e.g. wills made in 1360 and 1361: WRO, G23/1/213, ff. 39r–40r; 1446/23). For increasing
prayers and services asked of the ‘mayor and community, see the wills made in 1386, 1400, 1406 and 1407: WRO,
G23/150/111; G23/1/213, ff. 30v–31v; G23/1/216; 1446/43; TNA, PROB 11, 21 Marche. Alice Teynterer in 1406 left
money for the ‘poor commons’, accused the executors of her husband’s will of failures in their duties, and requested
her accusations be declaimed ‘in the mayor’s court’: WRO, G23/1/213, ff. 73v–74r. For a parallel example of city govern-
ment exerting control over bequests in the late fourteenth century, see the example of Pressburg (Bratislava): Judit
Majorossy, ‘“I wish my body to hallowed ground”: Testamentary Orders of the Burghers of Late Medieval Pressburg
about their Own Burial’, in On Old Age: Approaching Death in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, eds. Christian Krötzl and
Katariina Mustakallio (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 89–124.
79
Paul Trio and Marjan De Smet, ‘Processions in Towns: the Intervention of Urban Authorities in the Late Medieval Proces-
sions of the Low Countries’, in the themed issue, Processions and Church Fabrics in the Low Countries During the Late
Middle Ages, eds. Marjan De Smet, J. Kuys and P. Trio, K.U. Leuven Voorlopige Publicatie 111 (2006): 5, 9; Anna Benvenuti,
‘Culti civici: un confronto europeo’, in Vita religiosa e identità politiche: universalità e particolarismi nell’Europe del tardo
medioevo, ed. Sergio Gensini (Pisa: Pacini Editore, 1999), 181–214.
80
Noël Geirnaert, ‘De oudste sporen van het Heilig Bloed in Brugge (1255–1310)’, Handelingen van het Genootschap voor
Geschiedenis te Brugge 147 (2010): 247–55. The Bruges civic accounts (SB, 216) show incremental increases of expenditure
on the Holy Blood procession from 1304: see Brown, Civic Ceremony, 39–49.
81
Craft guilds did not process on Corpus Christi, though there were entremeses put on by religious orders, e.g. AMZ, LA,
1439‒40, ff. 103r–v; LC, 1442, f. 6r.
350 A. BROWN

establish ‘peace’.82 Salisbury city council never acquired the authority to call for
general processions, but it did encourage the development of a local cult, that of a former
bishop Osmund (d. 1099) after his canonisation in 1457. The protracted drive to canonise
the bishop had come from the cathedral chapter rather than the city,83 yet the cult was all
but adopted as the city’s own. The procession of the Midsummer Watch ‒ in which the
magistrates occupied a special place alongside craft guilds, some of whom put on plays –
became associated with St Osmund.84 It was with some pride that the city council later
likened their Watch for St Osmund with that for St Edward the Confessor in London.85
The orchestration of civic-wide processions within urban space was one of several ways
in which city councils became directly instrumental in the welfare of citizens’ souls.86 As in
Herlihy’s Pistoia, the exercise of charity also tended in this direction: it was a task that
municipal leaders could claim as a natural duty (being one of the seven works of mercy
enjoined on all Christians, lay as well as clerical), but also as a necessary one in dealing
with the typical urban problems of immigration and poverty. In Bruges, the municipal
supervision of hospitals and almshouses had begun early, in the late twelfth century
with the foundation of St John’s Hospital; it increased in the thirteenth century over
new foundations, and in the 1300s it was extended to the newly founded parish poor-
tables.87 Rights of guardianship were asserted over the greater number of almshouses
(‘houses of God’) founded for specifically targeted groups such as the elderly, indigent
or widowed,88 while another foundation in 1396 for the mentally ill (the dulhuis) was a
municipal initiative. In Salisbury the identification of city government with charitable
work was already being made in the early fourteenth century: some testators’ bequests
linked the payment of tallages with poor relief.89 It was increased in the 1370s when a
new hospital, the Holy Trinity, was established, which (in contrast to one previously
founded under the bishop’s control by 1229) was soon placed under mayoral supervi-
sion.90 A similar hospital foundation, with a confraternity dedicated to Our Lady of
Grace, was made in Zaragoza in 1425;91 and like other towns in Castile and Aragon,
municipal interest in charity probably began much earlier.92 Moreover, the exercise of

82
Brown, Civic Ceremony, especially 78–9, 260–7. In Zaragoza, the earliest cridas indicate that municipal orchestration of
‘general processions’ was already established: AMZ, LC, 1409‒10, f. 31r; 1410‒11, f. 39v; but they increased in frequency
after this date: AMZ, LC, 1433, ff. 11v–18v, 22v; LC, 1450, ff. 18v–23r, 27v. For their wider use in other towns, see for
instance, Löther, Prozessionen, 31–2, 40, 87–99, 235–46; and for Italy at an earlier date: Thompson, Cities of God, 158;
and for the increasing number of ‘crisis processions’ in fifteenth-century Florence: Trexler, Public Life, 354–60.
83
See the miracle collections assembled, first in the thirteenth century, then in the early fifteenth, by the cathedral chapter:
A.R. Malden, ed., The Canonization of St Osmund (Salisbury: Wiltshire Record Society, 1901).
84
For the processional order of the crafts set by the city council in 1480: WRO, G23/1/2, f. 139r.
85
As claimed by the city council in a petition to Thomas Cromwell in 1540: R. Benson and H. Hatcher, Old and New Sarum or
Salisbury (London: John Bowyer Nichols & Son, 1843), 126.
86
For the links in Barcelona, for instance, between the civic procession and a wider extension of municipal control over the
clergy and foundations, see Nikolas Jaspert, Stift und Stadt. Das Heiliggrabpriorat von Santa Anna und das Regularkano-
nikerstift Santa Eulàlia del Camp im mittelalterlichen Barcelona (1145–1423) (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1996), 367–73.
87
See Griet Maréchal, De sociale en politieke gebondenheid van het Brugse hospitaalwezen in de middeleeuwen (Kortrijk:
UGA, 1978); Michael T. Galvin, ‘The Poor Tables in Bruges 1270–1477′ (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1998).
88
For parallels in northern Italy towards specialisation in almshouse provision, see Henderson, Renaissance Hospital, 14–31.
89
For example, Elias Holmes (1348): WRO, G23/1/212, f. 17r.
90
WRO, 1446/11, 34, 43.
91
This had royal backing, but came from the initiative of vecinos in the city, and over which the jurados became inspectors:
María I. Falcón Pérez, ‘Sanidad y beneficencia en Zaragoza en el siglo XV’, Aragón en la Edad Media 3. Estudios de econ-
omía y sociedad, (siglos Xll al XV) (Zaragoza: Universidad de Zaragoza, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Departamento de
Historia Medieval, 1980): 192–6, 199.
92
For example, see María Teresa Iranzo Muñío, ‘Ciudad, ideología urbana y poder político en Huesca (siglos XII–XIV)’, in El
món urbà, ed. Rodríguez, 1: 421–35.
 JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL HISTORY 351

charity had further ramifications for the scope of civic authority. Official provision of poor
relief required decisions on who was qualified to receive it. The canonical distinction
between a ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor began to be applied more rigorously in
urban societies.93 In Bruges, a discriminatory attitude to the poor operated in the thir-
teenth century; and in all three cities during the fourteenth century management of hos-
pitals and almshouses, whose inmates prayed for benefactors’ souls, doubtless encouraged
the view that charity was a gift best restricted to the morally and socially trustworthy. Stan-
dards of morality required for the poor could also be transferred to other groups who were
perceived as potentially delinquent. The establishment of the Holy Trinity Hospital in Sal-
isbury reveals other municipal worries besides a concern to provide alms: an indulgence
granted in 1379 recalled that the hospital had been founded on the site of a brothel
where lewdness, murders and other mortal sins had been perpetrated.94
The desire among leading townsmen to purify urban space and its marginal groups
surfaced in other late medieval cities for a variety of reasons,95 but the insistence of
city governments that they had a wider role to play in upholding morality also
derived from another quintessentially urban problem, that of sanitation. Dominating
city-council proceedings in the fifteenth century was the humdrum business of main-
taining infrastructures (where crafts plied their trade, how water or food reached the
town, and how ‘ordure’ was removed from streets),96 but given the equation made in
medical theory between bodily and spiritual health, such business was inherently
more than mundane.97 A strong and perhaps hardening association was made
between sanitary and moral welfare. This was particularly marked in the fifteenth
century, for instance in legislation relating to prostitution.98 The bodies of prostitutes,
and other wayward individuals as well as animals, threatened to pollute the urban land-
scape in analogous ways.99 In Salisbury, the city council decided in 1442 to confine pros-
titution to Culver Street – a street also designated for the selling of animals. Because of
the ‘vileness’ of rotting animal remains, butchery was an activity ordered to take place at
the city limits; after 1452, prostitution could also no longer take place within the city
walls.100 In the same year, besides recording a royal decree to imprison vagrants, the
city council appointed special supervisors to remove filth in streets, gutters and
privies: cleansed and repaired they would be in a state of well-being to the adornment
93
Though when greater discrimination developed remains a matter of debate. For instance, contrast Michel Mollat, Les
pauvres au moyen âge (Paris: Hachette, 1978), 191–232, with Sharon Farmer, ‘The Beggar’s Body: Intersections of
Gender and Social Status in High Medieval Paris’, in Monks and Nuns. Saints and Outcasts, eds. Sharon Farmer and
Barbara H. Rosenwein (New York: Cornell University Press, 2000), 159–61.
94
WRO, 1446/34.
95
See the purge of the ‘Venice’ brothel in late fourteenth-century Prague, ordered by Charles IV, but possibly as part of
longer-term development of urban institutions: David Mengel, ‘From Venice to Jerusalem and Beyond: Milíč of Kroměříž
and the Topography of Prostitution in Fourteenth-Century Prague’, Speculum 79 (2004): 407–42, especially 428.
96
María I. Falcón Pérez, ‘Gobierno y poder municipal en las ciudades de Aragón en la baja Edad Media’, in El món urbà, ed.
Rodríguez, 1: 59–99.
97
See especially Rawcliffe, Urban Bodies; D. Jorgensen, ‘“All Good Rule of the Citee”: Sanitation and Civic Government in
England, 1400–1600′, Journal of Urban History 36 (2010): 300–15.
98
For more negative attitudes in Bruges towards prostitution, from the 1460s, see Guy Dupond, Maagdenverleidsters,
hoeren en speculanten. Prostitutie in Brugge tijdens de Bourgondische periode (1385–1515) (Bruges: Van de Wiele,
1996), 70–9.
99
See Jeremy P. Goldberg, ‘Pigs and Prostitutes: Streetwalking in Comparative Perspective’, in Young Medieval Women, eds.
Katherine J. Lewis, N.J. Menuge and K.M. Phillips (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), 172–93.
100
WRO, G23/1/1, ff. 131r, 148r. Prostitutes were to be removed from the city and be permitted entry only if wearing
striped hoods. The butchers were built a new house in 1445 at the city outskirts for slaughtering and scalding: G23/
1/1, f. 140v.
352 A. BROWN

of the city.101 Similar legislation was proclaimed in Zaragoza,102 where boundaries

between various areas of clean and unclean living, between citizens and other kinds of
marginal groups, were evidently imagined: in 1454 an order to prevent damage
caused by carts entering the town permitted them to enter through the gateway next
to the brothel and along by the Jews’ butchery, but not into the main marketplace, or
anywhere within the inner stone walls.103 Among late medieval town magistrates, a pur-
itanical sense already existed that cleanliness was close to godliness.
The municipal claim to supervise proper conduct extended itself beyond marginal
groups: clean and decorous behaviour was also demanded of enfranchised citizens.
Their speech too could be monitored for standards of hygiene. In Salisbury, William
Boket was punished by the city council in 1481 partly for defiling mayoral honour in
the High Street: among other ‘ungodly words’, he had called the mayor a ‘torde’ and a
‘fart’.104 Other city governments developed auditory means to encourage virtue. Civic
sponsorship of friars preaching to citizens in town squares appears to have increased in
the later fourteenth century, particularly in Italy but elsewhere too; and in Bruges
regular treasury payments were made for public sermons on Good Friday from the
1390s, as well as an increasing number in the fifteenth century on the occasion of
general processions.105 A moralising streak runs through fifteenth-century legislation per-
taining to the behaviour of householders, guildsmen, merchants and even town council-
lors.106 In Bruges, craft-guild rules that were brought together and approved by the city
council in the 1440s forbade guildsmen from living in adultery.107 In Zaragoza legislation
warning against the perils of gambling as well as prostitution appears in the first surviving
decrees in the early fifteenth century, but it increased in frequency.108 In 1433, the auth-
orities added another vice to the litany of crimes already related to the perils of dice: what

101
G23/1/1, ff. 159r–v.
102
An ‘overseer’ of roads and bridges was created in 1391 ‘for the cleanliness and beauty of the city’ (who in 1442 was
required to remove animals from the inner walls of the town, for the ‘beauty and decorum of the city’): Falcón Pérez,
‘Sanidad’, 184–5. Butchery and tanning could take place within the city, though the ‘bordel’ had to be placed at the out-
skirts and its denizens in 1433 were to wear distinctive apparel to distinguish them from respectable women; see also
AMZ, LA, 1439‒40, f. 48v. Following a royal decree in 1452, public prostitution was restricted to the ‘bordel’ and its enclo-
sure: AMZ, LC, 1433, ff. 7r–9v; LC, 1453, ff. 18v–19r; Falcón Pérez, ‘Gobierno y poder’, 88. In Bruges, the office of street
cleaners (muederaers) was created in the fourteenth century: Louis Gilliodts-Van Severen, Inventaire des archives de la ville
de Bruges. 9 vols. (Bruges: E. Gailliard, 1871–85), 4: 417–18.
103
AMZ, LC, 1454, f. 29r; Barraqué, Saragosse, 75.
104
WRO, G23/1/2, f. 222v.
105
Brown, Civic Ceremony, 116. In Zaragoza payments were made to friars for preaching in processions certainly by 1440:
AMZ, LA, 1439‒40, f. 158r. For parallels in Florence and Brescia: Trexler, Public Life, 380–2; Bowd, Venice’s Most Loyal City,
110–14, 128–51. For wider municipal interest in sermonising, Roberto Rusconi, ‘Public Purity and Discipline: States and
Religious Renewal’, in The Cambridge History of Christianity, IV: Christianity in Western Europe, c.1100–c.1500, eds. Miri
Rubin and Walter Simons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 459–64.
106
For high standards of morality required of citizens (and of clergy) by certain urban governments in England (though as
part of wider struggles with clerical jurisdiction), see H. Carrel, ‘Disputing Legal Privilege: Civic Relations with the Church
in Late Medieval England’, Journal of Medieval History 35 (2009): 279–96.
107
Rijksarchief, Bruges, Fonds ambachten, 1, passim. See for comparison discussion on ‘morality’ in London: Rexroth detects
(from civic legislation) in the late fourteenth century a ‘morality campaign’ to impose stricter standards of purity: Deviance
and Power, 126–87, 304–16; Shannon McSheffrey (from consistory-court evidence in the late fifteenth century) finds a
greater anxiety towards misbehaviour, and a ‘puritanical’ morality – which is connected, fleetingly, with a ‘more confident
civic Christianity’ and a ‘civic Catholicism’: Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London (University Park, PA:
Penn State University Press, 2006), especially 7–8, 185.
108
In 1448, it was decreed that those who were married but living in adultery were to be expelled: AMZ, LC, 1448, ff. 9v–
10r. A Christian woman who was accused of adultery with a Jew was tried in 1474: AMZ, P, 0071. See María I. Falcón Pérez,
‘Paz, orden y moralidad en Zaragoza en el siglo XV. Estatutos dictados al efecto por los jurados’, Aragón en la edad media,
XVI. Homenaje al Profesor emérito Ángel Sanvicente Pino, ed. María de los Desamparados Cabanes Pecourt (Zaragoza: Uni-
versidad de Zaragoza, 2000), 317–21.
 JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL HISTORY 353

was ‘worse’, they lamented, was that ‘blasphemies’ had also resulted.109 Decrees that
grouped prostitution, blasphemy and other kinds of illicit behaviour grew in volume
during the later fifteenth century;110 and in 1468 a decree was proclaimed that was
devoted exclusively to the extirpation of blasphemy, regardless of the status of the offen-
der. The churchwardens (procuradores) of each parish were ordered to be vigilant for the
crime.111 The wholesome behaviour of citizens, moreover, was emphasised particularly
when processions were called for: according to council decrees, a sinless city in procession
had to be ‘beautiful’ and in good order. These concerns had long been evident in north
Italian cities, but they are apparent at a later date in towns elsewhere, when evidence
becomes available.112 In Salisbury, during the annual procession of the St George frater-
nity, members were required to find one or two men to ‘wait on the George’, who were
to be ‘wele and clenly harneysed’.113 St Osmund’s procession and Watch demanded
similar salubrity: William Boket drew punishment in 1481 not just for his scatological
insult of the mayor, but also for refusing to attend the procession with the words: ‘a
farte for the watch’.114 In Bruges town-hall orders for general processions set out how
other citizens were to behave, in order that their prayers ‘would be better received by
the Almighty’: they were to go beforehand to confession and Mass, then watch the proces-
sion in solemn silence; and they were to remove obstructions and dirt from the streets.115
In Zaragoza, the city magistrates routinely ordered the streets to be cleansed of filth on
procession days. On Corpus Christi day, moreover, legislation began to require the
removal from streets of other profane individuals. From 1472 Muslims and Jews (who
had their own separate quarters within the city) were forbidden to look out of windows
at the passing Host.116
What emerges from various kinds of evidence relating to civic government – and par-
ticularly in surviving series of municipal decrees – is a rhetoric that buttressed the spiritual
authority of city councils.117 The sacred body of the town was run by a magistracy that
itself constituted a sacred body, and that in manifold ways worked for the common
good. Whether concerned with the poor, street cleaning or processions, the disparate
decrees of the jurados in Zaragoza are studded with phrases, announced in the ‘accus-
tomed places’ throughout the city, that insist endlessly on the attachment of government

109
‘ … e lo que es peyor es blasfema e reniegan de nuestro senyor Dios … ’: AMZ, LC, 1435‒6, f. 9r.
110
Falcón Pérez, ‘Gobierno y poder’, 68–9; Miguel Ángel Motis Dolader, ‘La justicia municipal en Zaragoza durante el siglo
XV: el juego de dados come ilícito punible’, in El món urbà, ed. Rodríguez, 3: 647–59. Profanities could also be associated
with profane places: in 1457 one Lope de Ojos Negros, a shoemaker, was prosecuted for blasphemy, disturbing the public
peace, and for gambling – before the gates of the Jewish butchery, AMZ, P, 0010, ff. 4v–5r.
111
AMZ, LA, 1468, ff. 74v–5r. This act was probably proclaimed publicly as a crida, but the cridas for this year do not survive.
The first crida devoted exclusively to blasphemy appears in 1474: AMZ, LC, 1473‒4, f. 8v. In Bruges, for a late fifteenth-
century campaign against blasphemy, see Brown, Civic Ceremony, 300–3. Note too the significance of similar campaigns
in north-Italian towns, e.g. E. Horodowich, ‘Civic Identity and the Control of Blasphemy in Sixteenth-Century Venice’, Past
and Present 181 (2003): 3–33.
112
For civic processions in thirteenth-century Italy, see Thompson, Cities of God, especially 166–74.
113
WRO, G23/1/2, f. 222v.
114
See above, n. 104.
115
‘ … zo dat de bedinghen ende oracien van elken te bet ghehoort ende onfanghen moghen worden voor de van almo-
ghenden god … ’: SB, 96, i, ff. 63v–64v (1491) – the year of the first surviving town-hall decrees.
116
AMZ, LC, 1471‒2, f. 17v. Orders on association between Christians and Jews during processions were made more strin-
gent from 1487 (LC, 1486‒7, ff. 17r–18r), part of the renewed royal campaign against the Muslim kingdom of Granada (LC,
1486‒7, ff. 15v, 19r, 21r, 24r, 31r).
117
For the ‘ideological ascendancy’ of magistracies, see Juan Antonio Barrio Barrio, ‘Los sistemas de propaganda política de
las elites urbanas en el reino de Valencia. Siglos XIII–XV’, in El món urbà, ed. Rodríguez, 3: 63–72; Vizcaíno, ‘Ideología’,
273–87.
354 A. BROWN

to the ‘public good’ and ‘stability’, and its desire to prevent all ‘scandal’ and ‘harm’, as well
as to encourage ‘peace’, ‘charity’ and ‘justice’.118 Thus processions were often called to pray
to God to protect the ‘health’ (sanidat) of the people, and could end with distributions to
the poor;119 contributions to the welfare of inmates of the city hospital of Our Lady of
Grace were pronounced ‘holy and just’;120 among the penalties for blasphemy set down
in the council act of 1468 was a fine to be paid to this hospital.121 Moreover, other evidence
suggests awareness among individual civic leaders in the same period that merely to parrot
the rhetoric of the common good was not enough. Their post-obit gifts show efforts to
contribute individually to the common good of the city as well as the spiritual authority
of town councils. Benefaction to municipal services, given their sacred goals, proved a
way of resolving the inherent contradiction between the social need to demonstrate
status and the spiritual requirement to act as the humble penitent.122 In fifteenth-
century Salisbury, a type of bequest peculiar to former mayors or members of the 24
was of money or property given to the mayor and community for ‘the use of the city’,
or to spiritual and charitable activity in which the city government was directly involved:
the support of tallage payment, the St George fraternity, the shrine of St Osmund, the
inmates of the Trinity Hospital and other city almshouses, and the city prison.123 The
widespread distribution of bequests by councillors to many parishes and guilds seems a
reflection less of divided loyalties than of a concern to demonstrate munificence to the
city as a whole. Their increasing use also of parish churchwardens to manage their
long-term commemoration is also a measure of the growing integration of municipal
and parish administrations.124 In Bruges, a greater number of town councillors from
the late fourteenth century made foundations that were tied both to the payment of
doles at parish poor-tables and to the enhancement of feast days of civic-wide cults,
Marian and Eucharistic.125 Some individual benefactions also boosted the spiritual auth-
ority of city governments. Jan Waghenare’s foundation in 1395 provided not just for a
Holy Ghost Mass during municipal elections, but also for a mandatum ‒ or Maundy ‒
service in St Donatian’s during which every Thursday the celebrant would wash the feet
of five poor people ‒ two of whom were to be selected by the aldermen’s burgomaster.

Conclusion
Comparisons among the three cities (and among these and others) can only be taken so
far. The reasons and timing for particular religious foundations or ceremonies varied
according to local circumstances; the social and political backgrounds of city councillors
118
One or more of the phrases buen commun, buen publico, buen stanimiento and buen policia, or the stado pacifico and
stado tranquilo of the city, appear in every year of the council’s decrees.
119
Falcón Pérez, ‘Sanidad’, 188–9. For the first reference in the cridas to doles to the poor in processions, see AMZ, LC,
1473‒4, f. 11r.
120
‘ … cosa santa e justa’: AMZ, LA, 1471, f. 220r, quoted in Falcón Pérez, ‘Sanidad’, 218.
121
AMZ, LA, 1468, f. 74v.
122
See, for instance, studies of wills in Regensburg and Lübeck: Richard, Mémoires bourgeoises, 217–86; Rüther, Prestige,
57–71.
123
Between 1395 and 1536, the wills of 42 former mayors survive: almost all make one or more bequests of this type, a
much higher proportion than wills of other citizens.
124
See n. 78 above. After 1455 (until 1547) only three more names of benefactors who gave property were added to city
bede roll, though 10 were added for giving money; seven former mayors between 1485 and 1547 bequeathed gifts for
long-term celebrations of Mass in their parish churches, and only two of them appear on the city bede roll.
125
Brown, Civic Ceremony, 108–17.
 JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL HISTORY 355

and leading citizens in different regions affected their motives. Yet at a general level, it is
possible to observe common features in religious practices associated with urban govern-
ment, as well as to identify them as aspects of ‘civic religion’. The term works well as a
descriptor of practices that in effect drew out the sacred implications of municipal rule.
In late medieval cities of varying size and autonomy, within northern Italy and elsewhere,
ruling bodies made considerable efforts to enhance their authority. They did so partly, as
Vauchez argued, by developing the values inherent in the commune as a religious frater-
nity; but they also did so, in the process of dealing with the problems of urban life, by
developing areas of jurisdiction that inherently had a religious dimension. In grappling
with issues specific to urban communities, particularly the issues of immigration,
poverty, charity and sanitation, all tasks charged with spiritual meaning, governing coun-
cils developed an authority over city dwellers that was more than mundane or worldly. In
exercising this authority, they felt the need to call on clerical services and invest in religious
observances and ceremonies, thus embellishing what Herlihy tentatively called the ‘litur-
gical splendor’ of municipal rule. Urban governments presented their routine work as a
mission to create a holy city, populated by a chosen people who, if amenable to municipal
correction, might be worthy of divine reward. The claim that municipal activity served a
sacred end entitled city councils to supervise the spiritual practices of citizens, usually in
ways that did not conflict with the sacramental or pastoral role of the priesthood. It also
made civic leaders more conscious of the need to demonstrate their own attachment to the
common good, especially when faction and tensions threatened to divide them.
‘Civic religion’ does not work well in all its associated senses. As a term linked with ‘civil
religion’ and with a trend to ‘secularisation’ it fails to describe and explain municipal
investment in religious ceremony and in clerical services used to construct a more
sacred city. As a term that implies a specifically ‘urban’ mode of religion, it fails to do
justice to the variety of devotional experiences within towns – except in so far as such
variety was particular to towns. But detached from these associations, it usefully describes
the nature of practices that developed the sacred potential of municipal rule. It is also
useful in one further respect. The ambiguity of the phrase – at once ‘municipal’ and
‘urban’ – captures the equation between the two that was actively promoted in cities, par-
ticularly by the fifteenth century. Although the available evidence is often uneven and
incomplete, it does appear that the investment made by civic leaders in religious ceremony
became stronger from the late fourteenth century onwards – perhaps in part as a response
to challenges to authority that were more widely evident in this period. The men who ran
city governments sought to demonstrate more insistently than before that the goals of the
governing few and those of the urban many were one and the same at a moral and sacred
level. These changes did not happen at the same level or pace in all late medieval cities:
Italian city-states were more precocious than most, and did not need to incorporate the
interests of overlords into their promotion of the civic good. But the difficulties their
ruling bodies faced, and the investments they made in administrative structures and in
religious ceremony, were similar in kind to towns elsewhere. ‘Civic religion’ points to
the links and elisions made by urban leaders in sacred contexts between municipal auth-
ority and the common good of their towns: in this sense it might serve as a productive term
for analysis of key religious practices within the late medieval urban environment.
356 A. BROWN

Acknowledgements
I would very much like to thank my two anonymous referees for their comments and suggestions
on an earlier draft of this article.

Notes on contributor
Andrew Brown is a Senior Lecturer at Massey University. He was a research fellow at Keble College,
Oxford, and a Senior Lecturer at Edinburgh University. His books and articles have focused chiefly
on the religious and ceremonial practices of townspeople in late medieval Flanders and England.