Chapter Seven—
A Heretic and a Saint

lu ioco deli dadi
Translation of Hec alea -lee in the section "De Ludo" of the fifteenth-century "Glossario Latino-Reatino del Cantalicio: Ordo vocabulorum sub cantalycio"^[1]

Almost four years earlier, on 15 July 1334 (a Friday), quite different visitors with quite a different purpose were at Santa Scolastica, with its abbess Suor Scolastica. The inquisitor of the Roman province, the Franciscan Fra Simone di don Filippo da Spoleto had come, with two Augustinian Hermits, Fra Andrea the lector at Sant'Agostino Rieti and Fra Giovanni da Amelia, and with the inquisitor's notary, to interrogate one of the nuns, Suor Ceccarella di Giovanni Retinecte, still young, about twenty years old. Ceccarella was asked questions and she told a story, and her abbess, Suor Scolastica, swore that she had heard the story and that Ceccarella had told it.^[2]

Ceccarella said that that Paolo who was being questioned by the inquisition had said to her that he wanted to see if she was obedient to him, and he told her to show her obedience by undressing. With some difficulty he had made her strip to the skin and then he had done it too. He had told her to lie on the ground naked and he had lain next to her and taken her into his hands and tried to get her to sin with him. But she had resisted and, by divine power she believed, had been able to

free herself from his grasp. Getting up she had redressed herself and then had sat totally stunned. Paolo had then come to her and asked, "Did you not want to obey me because you thought it was a sin?" And she had said, "Yes." But he had said that it was not a sin, that which he had done and wanted to do, and that he had had a revelation from the Holy Spirit, and that he would not have attempted it if he had not known that it was the will of God. And Paolo had said that Ceccarella should have obeyed him when he wanted to commit adultery with her. And she in her simplicity had not understood the word "adhulterij"; and she had said to him, "Quid est adhulterium (what is adultery)?" And Paolo had said that it was what he had wanted to do with her. And he had told her that his was the best way, better than any other, to mortify the flesh and that no woman in those parts no matter how saintly she was could be shamed by it.

Asked where all this had happened, Ceccarella said it was in a house that belonged to Contessa Jotii who was "now" in the third order of Saint Francis and for whom at the time Ceccarella had been a servant (famula ) and that it was the house where Paolo had then lived. Asked if anyone else had been there, Ceccarella said no; and asked if the door to the house had been closed, she said yes. Asked when all this had happened, she said that it was the last Friday of the month of March in the year in which it had happened and she thought two years, or maybe one, before that Lent most recently past. She could not remember the year with certainty but she could remember, she said again, that it was the last Friday. Then Ceccarella's story went on. She remembered that in the same house, the one where Paolo lived, which was Contessa Jotii's, which was next to the house of Jacobutia di Zacharello the macellaio (butcher), Paolo had induced Contessa because of her obedience to him to undress herself. And he had said that there is no greater crown than that which a woman earns in this undressing and a lot of words like that. Then Paolo and Contessa went into a room (camera ) in the house, he alone with her alone, Contessa consenting reluctantly but consenting, with Paolo saying to her the same things he had said to Ceccarella, and Contessa taking off her clothes until she was naked. Whether or not they had sinned sexually Ceccarella did not know.

And at another time when Paolo had insisted that Ceccarella take off her clothes, Contessa, whose maid Ceccarella then was, had said to her, "Daughter, you can do what he orders perfectly well, that is, undress yourself before him, because I did the same thing when he ordered it." Ceccarella could not remember exactly when this conversation hap-

pened but it was after Contessa had undressed herself and it was before Ceccarella did. And Ceccarella further said that when she was disturbed after the incidents Paolo told her not to be disturbed because he had been told by God or by the Holy Spirit that he could not sin sins of the flesh. And Contessa had told her that she could not be shamed because she had done nothing that Contessa would not do. And on the same day of inquisition Fra Simone the inquisitor asked Ceccarella how old she had been when this all happened and she replied, always under oath, that she believed that she had been over ten, because she believed in fact that she had been eighteen and more.

On 15 July, the same day, in the house of the Franciscans at Rieti, in the inquisitor's room, in the presence of Fra Giovanni di don Bartolino da Spoleto, and Fra Matheutio da Poggio, and the Franciscan notary Berardo, the inquisitor examined Paolo Angelecti Venuti da Rieti, of the sestiere Porta Romana de sotto—that Paolo Zoppo alias Paolo de Carcere whose notorious fame had come to the ears of the inquisitor, he said, notoriety for having gathered with other men and women and, forgetting his own safety and divine and ecclesiastical law, under the pretense of mortification of the flesh and demonstration of special perfection and virtue, had made nude women lie with him and commit improper and libidinous acts.^[3]

Paolo, at the inquisition of 16 July, confessed that he had made Contessa the daughter of Jotio and widow of Paolo, who was "now" in the third order of Saint Francis, undress in his presence and believe she was doing a good thing. Asked where, he answered in Contessa's house in the contrada of the Piazza Maggiore next to the house of Zaccarello Accorsechti the butcher and to the street. He said that they were alone in the room when he gave her the discipline. Asked how long ago it had been, he replied that he could not really remember but that it was a year and more. He confessed that another time in the house of Contessa that is the house of Tommaso di Cola next to the house of the sons of Schaiacta in Rieti he had made Ceccarella di Giovanni Retinechte lie nude on a bench telling her she was mortifying her flesh for the love of Jesus Christ, and he had undressed himself and had lain next to her; and then, frightened, she had gotten up.

Thus begins (for us) through day after day of recorded questioning and answering a Reatine story which grows broader and deeper and in various ways more frightening and sordid, but also more poignant, and more puzzling, as it progresses. It is recorded in an exquisite paper book, now in the Vatican library at Rome, written by the inquisitorial

notary (by imperial authority) Martino di magistro Aimone of Viterbo at the command of the inquisitor Simone, written in an elegant and careful hand, by a notary who was not always perfectly attentive (as when Paolo according to Ceccarella approached her, he excesit ad eam corrected—in another or altered hand—in the manuscript to accesit ) and not always able perfectly to read the documents he copied (as when he mentions Contessa's dead husband for the first time and leaves blank his patronymic).^[4]

The composite document of the paper book is an inquisitorial record and it shows many of those qualities for which inquisitorial records are notorious. Much of its questioning and answering may have come from the textbooks of inquisitorial manuals formed without interest in or knowledge of Reatine physical or spiritual topography.^[5] The motives of the questioning it records are not disinterested: most particularly the questions are put by a conventional and conventual Franciscan who in the section in which he first describes Paolo's notoriety has extended the description of his responsibilities, as the representative of Pope John XXII, of searching out and extirpating heretics and those who favor them, specifically to include the "sect of the fraticelli of the poor life" condemned by the apostolic see.^[6] Simone was a good Franciscan (good in the sense that John XXII was a good pope) out to get the bad Franciscans, and to tar them with bad connections, like Paolo Zoppo. It is, after the nature of inquisitorial processes, as we have been taught, drenched with sex.^[7] It begins with sexual acts tied by the inquisitor, and probably also by Paolo, to the common heretical notion of perfection through courted and, in proper cases, resisted temptation. From this beginning it moves toward more disturbing gestures of sexual perversion.

What kind of historical truth can this record tell? It tells, as any historian now could answer, itself. But that self is not simple and it cannot be left at rest. A fresh and vigorous recent essay on inquisitors written by James Given helps one enter these documents, see things in them, uncertainly, beneath the surface of the text, and helps one, having accepted the fact that only the text exists, push toward those events, people, minds, external to it and prior to it, that one wants to see.^[8] And one has at least the illusion of help from the fact that here in this Rieti case one is repeatedly dealing with people and piazzas whom and which one knows in other ways.

Given quotes, from a Paris manuscript, an extreme example of the early fourteenth-century stated consciousness that inquisitors could per-

suade their victims to say anything and to be seen in any way they, the inquisitors, wanted. The Franciscan Bernard Délicieux told Philip IV, Given tells us, that, had the inquisitors had before them Peter and Paul, these two could have been found heretics.^[9] And the inquisitorial techniques that Given's essay suggests, the circling questioning, the isolation, the fluctuation of attitude, the bondage, exist to sweep the pathetic Reatine figures, Paolo and Contessa, into the pit. Franciscans and Dominicans with their trained attention to personal response, to preaching, to anecdote, to illustrated event, with their accustomed ways of explaining things personally, were of necessity experts in human psychology, and this is dreadfully apparent in the first questioning part of the work of the Franciscan inquisitor, Simone da Spoleto.^[10]

Simone may have been unusually avid, driven; one cannot tell when one observes him in isolation. But he adds himself to the composite portrait of the penetrating, trapping Franciscan inquisitor. The observer of his victims cannot be sure what in the victims' confessions has not been created, not just abstracted but created, by the manipulation of the inquisitor. But he, the observer, also knows that the composite narrative that emerges in the record is one that could make enough sense, reason, to be said, heard, written down in 1334, that it is (insofar as it can be separated from our shaping reading) an early fourteenth-century artifact, created, with the patterns given them, by this Spoletan and these Reatines, at Santa Scolastica, at the Franciscan house by the river, in the cathedral, in Rieti. This document, difficult as it is as a piece of evidence, has tremendous potential value for the understanding of fourteenth-century Rieti, its religion, its people.

Perhaps one can experiment a bit with the (superficially, to the modern mind) most disgusting, or degrading, story at the dark center of Paolo Zoppo's confessions. For a time Paolo, who we are told was called Paolo de Carcere, had lived as an urban anchorite, in a carcere , a cell attached to the Reatine church of San Leopardo.^[11] On the seventh day of recorded testimony, on 25 July, in the camera of the inquisitor at San Francesco, with Fra Francesco da Longone, Fra Matteo da Poggio, and "me" the Franciscan notary Berardo da Rieti present, Paolo confessed that while he was at the cell at San Leopardo (existens ad carceres Sancti Leopardi ) he took (accepit ) a female dog (vnam canem ) and stuck his fingers into the vagina of the little dog (canicule ) and manipulating the vagina of the dog he brought himself to ejaculation (corrupit se ipsum )—and in this inquisition ejaculation is as important, as focused on, as is the shedding of blood in inquisitions concerning assault, a kind

of legal decisiveness probably encouraged by limited anatomical understanding.

Now we ask questions. Did the notary or the inquisitor simply lie about the dog, make her up? Was it a form of degradation which the inquisitor had been taught or had taught himself to elicit and present? Had the inquisitor been taught or taught himself, through the use of manuals or in some other fashion, that this practice, the digital sexual abuse of a dog, was an appropriate one to be suggested to the shaken minds of victims of low status, to disheveled witnesses, particularly those meant to be connected with the fraticelli? Did the inquisitor successfully suggest the incident to Paolo? Did the frightened Paolo seeking in some way to please the inquisitor search in the depths of his own mind for an image which would be sufficiently disgusting to satisfy the inquisitor, even to allow the inquisitor to stop probing Paolo's memory, his consciousness of himself and his past behavior? Was Paolo's use of the dog something that he had been brought to think he had remembered? Had Paolo in his enclosure, almost crazily, abused the dog? Had Paolo rebelling against the advertised holiness of living in a cell sought and found a debasement sordid enough to satisfy his distaste for his position or his hypocrisy? Questions of this sort can continue in our minds as the inquisitors' questions continue day after day in the account. But is this, here, entirely the wrong track? Was this kind of behavior with dogs common, in image and act, in relatively rural central Italy in the fourteenth century? Was it in its setting normal behavior?

As often, the historian must be guided by his own inner darkness. But the narrative, the incident, exploded by questions, reveals a variety of otherwise unknown Reatine sentiments and structures, as does the entire inquisitorial source with its involvement of canons, vicar general, families like the Alfani and the Secinari. In following the events of the source's narrative the reader's mind must be armed with critical questions, not entirely different from, perhaps only an exaggerated form of, the questions he must always be asking a historical source. But here, particularly in certain scenes, as when one deals with the helpfully significant account of Paolo's false miracles, one must be particularly sensitive, aware of a subsurface of various possibilities held together by the Latin surface of the text.^[12]

In his first preserved interrogation, his first interrogation on 15 July, Paolo, asked, had said that he had gotten Contessa to undress at a time before he had gotten Ceccarella to do so, and that he had gotten Contessa to undress twice in the way he had confessed, in her own house,

with no one watching.^[13] Beyond that, in his first session, Paolo denied all allegations. On the same day he was again interrogated and then admitted having gotten Ceccarella to undress a second time in Contessa's house while he and Contessa were both present in the house, but he said that Ceccarella was inside a camera and he and Contessa were outside of it. Asked if he ever said that the act of fornication (fornicationis : genitive) was not a sin he said no. Asked if he believed that the women who undressed before him gained merit for doing it, he said that he had then believed it but that he now thought that the acts were mortal sins (peccata mortalia ). Asked if he knew anyone else who shared his old opinion of that rite, he said no, not unless Contessa believed that about those heretical rites (supradictis hereticalibus ritis ). Asked if he knew anything about what was going to happen between him and the inquisitor before he came before him, he said that "yesterday" Reccha of Rieti had said to him "You better get away because something has been said to the inquisition against you"; and asked if he had talked about it to anyone he said, yes, to Contessa: he had said, "It's us—Sibi nos sumus, sibi tu et ego incusati Inquisitioni ," and she had replied, "It's caught up with us—Male uadit factum nostrum ." This interrogation occurred in the same place as the previous hearing and with the same witnesses, with Matheutio identified more fully as of Poggio Bustone (and one should notice the Franciscan witnesses from places which had had Franciscan establishments by the time of Bishop Tommaso's list).^[14]

On the same day, presumably at another session, Paolo was told by the inquisitor that he had six days to defend himself.^[15] He was told that he should stand ready to be summoned at any time, that he should not flee or go away from the place where he was put and that he should not talk about the affair with any person without special license to do so. Then on the following day, the sixteenth, this time in the sacristy of the cathedral church with the bishop's vicar general Francesco, archpriest of Santa Maria di Canetra present, Paolo's questioning began again: the scenes of undressing, the convincing of the women, the words said.^[16] Paolo ended the session (as it is recorded) by quoting his definition to Ceccarella, "Adhulterium est illud quod ego uolui facere tecum," as if both would remember, as they might have remembered, this personal dictionary definition. The presence of Paolo in the cathedral sacristy with Francesco the vicar general is the first recorded notice of the entry into the case of the official diocesan church, a necessary entry for the case's legitimacy.

On 16 July Paolo was subjected to two more sessions of inquisition

in the sacristy with the vicar general present, and then he was again warned by the inquisitor not to run away.^[17] In the second session of the day Paolo's motivation for making the women undress was further explored. Paolo again said that Ceccarella had undressed completely and so had he, and that he naked lay next to her naked, and that he wished and intended to approach her as a husband does his wife (sicut appropinquat maritus uxorem ), or as a nude man a nude woman but without orgasm (sine corruptione ). Paolo admitted that a lewd intent, the malice of lust, led him to induce Ceccarella to undress. And he admitted that when he was with Contessa, and they two were in a camera together and Ceccarella was outside alone, he made her undress for the pleasure of seeing her naked, at a time when he talked of testing her obedience.

When Paolo was asked by the inquisitor to tell him from whom he had learned this rite of obedience, he said that he had learned it from Fra Rainaldo, a fraticello from Spoleto, who had then been staying in the place (loco ) called Foresta at Rieti and San Marone or Maro near Rieti. Paolo said that Rainaldo was "now" dead and that he had died in the house of Lotorono Alfani of Rieti and that he was buried in the cemetery of the major church of Rieti. Asked what Rainaldo had taught him, Paolo replied that he had taught him that this behavior was practiced at Spoleto, that a nude man lay with a nude woman without intercourse. Asked whether Rainaldo had said that it was a good thing to do, Paolo said that Rainaldo had not said it was good or bad. Asked where this instruction by Rainaldo had taken place, Paolo replied in the city of Rieti but he could not remember where; asked about when it had happened, he said about ten or twelve years before. Asked if, when he had heard about these things from Fra Rainaldo, he had believed him and, more, had believed they were not sinful, Paolo answered yes.

At the third session in the sacristy on 16 July Paolo swore of his own free will, the record says, and without fear of any torture or other force that all the things he had confessed in the loco of the friars minor "yesterday (heri )" and all that he had confessed in the sacristy of the cathedral church with the vicar general present "today (hodie )" were true. And at this final session of the day other witnesses were present, including Don Angelo di don Paolo of Rieti, Giovanni Reatino, Ballovino di magistro Giovanni, Leonardo Angeli, and a man from Spoleto named Petronio Jannanucti—altogether seven witnesses besides the notary.

In further confessions which are dated 17 and 25 July and which took place in the camera of the inquisitor at San Francesco, Paolo added material to his story of his encounters with Contessa: a bed in the cham-

ber; the undressed Contessa's making five genuflections in a cross on the floor; her saying "I put myself in your hands do with me what you will"; Paolo's holding her in his arms, holding her tight to him and kissing her on the mouth, and wanting to sin with her and have an orgasm within her; and their being thus alone many times, perhaps twenty; and her holding his head in her lap and Paolo's thus masturbating; and Contessa's undressing, or undressing to the waist in her dress with the large neck; and Paolo's talk of merit in the eyes of God. On 17 July Paolo also said that he had told these stories in confession to dompno Filippo de Cospiano who lived near San Giovanni Evangelista Rieti and to dompno Giovanni Petrignani, and that both of them had given him absolution.^[18]

On 16 July at San Francesco in the camera of Fra Appollonio of Brescia, with Appollonio and Fra Giacomo the educated baccellario of the convent and the Franciscan notary present, Contessa herself faced the inquisitor; and here she is identified slightly more fully: Contessa filia Jotii uxor quondam Pauli Piscis de Reate de Porta Romana de super.^[19] The inquisitor read her his charge and explained it in the vernacular, and she admitted knowing of Paolo's lying naked with Ceccarella in her own house and inducing her to sin with shameful words (turpia uerba ); but then Contessa added a new scene to the narrative. Paolo had come to her, after his experience with Ceccarella, and had begged her out of compassion to come with him, and all three—Paolo, Contessa, and Ceccarella—had gone to the garden of dompno Giovanni priest at the church of San Giovanni within the walls of Rieti, and there in the garden before dompno Giovanni, and with another priest of San Giovanni, dompno Filippo, present and hearing, all of them hearing, Ceccarella had told everything that Paolo had done and attempted to do. And Paolo had said "Ego dico culpa mea de illis rebus (I say that the fault is mine in these things)"—but he did not specify. And after that Paolo began to engage Contessa herself in small talk and he was more frequently at her house. Then he began his seduction of obedience and merit and undressing. And then Contessa spoke of the five—here five or six—genuflections which he made her do (and so they may have thus found their way into Paolo's narrative). Contessa said that two years had since passed and that she had often since then confessed these things and been absolved by many priests (pluries fuit confessa et absoluta pluribus Sacerdotibus ). On 18 July in the same place (now called the cella or camera of Fra Appollonio—a nice hesitance) before the same witnesses Contessa faced the inquisitor again. She spoke of Paolo's

words and acts as he had her undress to the waist and totally, of his talk of merit, of his giving her the kiss of peace on the mouth.^[20]

On 18 July, in the foresteria (the place for visitors) at San Francesco, the inquisitor asked the secret advice and consent of his board of local counselors: the bishop's vicar general (Francesco); two of the podestà's judges; Tommaso Cimini; Giovanni de Canemorto (who was repeatedly counselor to the chapter); the abbot of Sant'Eleuterio (who was Andrea di don Sinibaldo); Don Giacomo Leoparducii; Fra Bernardo de Bagnoregio, the custos of Rieti; Fra Francesco da Santa Rufina, the visitor of the pope; Fra Berardo da Rieti; Fra Giovanni di don Bartolino.^[21] The inquisitor asked the counselors to answer three questions: first, were the things said and confessed against Paolo "Cioppo" heretical? second, should Paolo be condemned as a heretic? third, should he be put to the torture to make him confess fully?

Don Giovanni de Canemorto's responses are recorded first: yes it was heresy; no he should not be condemned as a heretic, because of some vacillation; yes he should be put to torture in order to arrive at and confirm the truth. A number of the counselors agreed with Don Giovanni: Tommaso Cimini; the three communal judges; Francesco, the vicar; the Franciscan visitor; and the Franciscan custos . Don Giacomo Leoparducii's counsel was different: he thought that the things confessed were heretical; he thought Paolo should not be condemned because of his wretched (or low) condition: "quia est uilis condictionis inspecta condictione persone"; Paolo should not be put to the torture in order to preserve, not to damage, the good reputation of the people of Rieti and the honor of the city: "non est torquendus propter famam conseruandam popularum Reatinarum et propter honorem Ciuitatis"—and he offered a fourth consiglio that Paolo should be put in prison or in some other way punished. The abbot (the canon Andrea di don Sinibaldo) agreed with Don Giacomo. The Franciscan notary, Fra Berardo da Rieti, counseled that the inquisitor should perform the duties of his office, but with mercy ("faciat debitum officij sui cum misericordia"). Fra Giovanni di don Bartolino counseled that the words were heretical but that the inquisitor should accommodate the city and citizens as much as he could ("condescenderet Ciuibus et Ciuitati quam posset"). Fra Nicola da Fossa, whose name was not in the list of counselors, said that Paolo should not be tortured and that the words he said were not heretical.^[22]

On 20 July Francesco, the episcopal vicar, gave his consent to Fra Simone's proceeding to torture Paolo, to which, as the record says,

presumably because Francesco had said it, the greater part of the counselors had agreed. Francesco said this before Don Corrado de Murro, Don Giacomo di don Sinibaldo, and the Franciscan notary Berardo, in the piazza of the major church and of San Giovanni Battista (the baptistry), in front of that church.^[23] On the same day Paolo was again before the inquisitor, but in the camera of the podestà of Rieti, and in the presence of his two judges who were counselors to the inquisitors (Alberico de Montegammara and Matteo de Fermo) and, of course, the Franciscan notary, and counselor, Berardo da Rieti. He was back to the story of obedience, undressing, lying together, without perhaps knowing whether he should emphasize or conceal the belief that it brought merit in the sight of God. But in this room, presumably nearer to instruments of torture than was the inquisitor's room at San Francesco, a new figure enters the recorded testimony, the diavolo whose involvement in the practice he had once but no longer believed was good, he now acknowledged.^[24]

On 23 July Paolo was again before the inquisitor talking of people who had known of his behavior: dompno Giovanni Petrignani, Don Matteo Loderoni (di Ladorono), Angelicto de Palatio, and dompno Filippo (like Giovanni a priest of San Giovanni "de Statua," as San Giovanni Evangelista is here called); and all except Angelicto had reproved him. This had happened in the house of Angelicto. And Paolo talked of frequent gatherings in the garden of the priest dompno Giovanni Petrignani. A group went to the garden to see dompno Giovanni, and there he read to them: Contessa Jotii and other women including Nicolutia who lived with (prope ) Nicola but was never married (and any reader must feel the inquisitorial net closing around the priests of San Giovanni Evangelista and feel at the same time interest in and some surprise at this reading group, oddly seeming to predict early fifteenth-century Norfolk). This session of the inquisition occurred in the inquisitor's camera, with as witnesses Berardo the notary and Fra Giovanni di don Bartolino of Spoleto, two familiari of the inquisitor—and before the name of one of these the Viterbese notary inserted the "me" which belonged to Berardo and had then to cancel it.^[25]

Paolo's session of 24 July (a Sunday) took place in the loggia of the inquisitor's camera at San Franceseo.^[26] It demanded of Paolo an unaccustomed, here, kind of memory, a very short one. And he told a story dramatic in a new way, the story of his escape from and return to imprisonment. That day, Paolo said, he, kept in a house closed to make a jail (a carcere ) and bound hand and foot by order of the inquisitor, fled,

escaped, hid himself. Asked how he managed to do it, Paolo answered that he freed his hands with his teeth, and then his feet with his hands. He went toward the gate, went up the steps to it, but the gate was closed. He took it with his hands and lifted it from its frame and got out. He ran to the piazza of the Cappellarii and then into a house of Rainaldo di Pietro di don Giovanni (or Rainaldo Pietro di don Giovanni) which Rainaldo "had for living in," but Rainaldo was not home, and Paolo hid in the house. When Rainaldo came home to his house he found Paolo there. And he rebuked him for escaping, and he said "You did a bad thing when you escaped." Then Paolo sent Rainaldo to Petricono Cimini so that he would tell Don Tommaso Secinari (the future bishop) that Paolo wanted to place himself in Tommaso's hands. Rainaldo coming back to Paolo from Petricono brought him Petricono's message that he, Paolo, should return himself to the inquisitor. Then Paolo sent Rainaldo to the inquisitor to say that he wanted to return to captivity. Rainaldo came back and took Paolo to the inquisitor.

Paolo, asked by the inquisitor if he had any help in his flight, in the opening of his house of detention, or untying his hands and feet, or any kind of aid, help, counsel, or favor, said no. Asked if he met anyone in his flight or when he escaped from the house of detention, Paolo said that he met a lot of people but no one whom he knew.

On 25 July Paolo was before the inquisitor within his camera, again with as witnesses Fra Francesco da Longone, Fra Matteo da Poggio, and the notary Berardo. In this session he enriched his testimony.^[27] After Paolo had taken to wearing religious dress he once went for the indulgence of the Portiuncula and on the trip he repeatedly kissed Cintia Rubei Petri di don Giovanni and they planned to have sexual relations with each other, but they did not find an opportunity to sin. Afterwards they returned to Rieti and many many times (multotiens et multotiens ) they were together and kissed in her house and elsewhere and she consented to have sexual intercourse with him but they did not have an opportunity to sin. This all began, Paolo said, about twelve years earlier. And Paolo confessed having spiritual conversations with Maglietta Catalicii; and he was with her in her house and wanted to hug and kiss her and have sexual intercourse with her, but she refused. Then he told the story of the female dog in his anchorage. He said that that happened at the time he was involved with Cintia (so presumably he was not locked in his cell), and he said it was about the time in which his (otherwise unmentioned) son was born—and he stopped being involved with Cintia about six years before the time of the inquisition.

In a second session on 25 July again in his camera at San Francesco the inquisitor returned Paolo to the old question of undressing women and lying naked with them naked; and a new woman was introduced into the cast, Giovanna the daughter of Giovanni di Giovanni de (?)Arono, citizen of Rieti (ciuem Reat' agrees with Giovanna, accusative, not Giovanni, genitive).^[28] She was approached in the house of Contessa, who was present in the house, as "it seemed to Paolo (uidetur sibi )" was Ceccarella. It was a time more recent than the first Contessa incident. Did Giovanna believe Paolo's words? Paolo believed not. And, as with the question of Ceccarella's presence, the uncertainty of seeming and believing now appears in Paolo's words: "Interrogatus si illa Johanna credebat uerbis suis, respondit quod credit quod non ut credit."

After the Giovanna part of the inquisition Paolo's talk returned, or was returned, to the priests of San Giovanni Evangelista, and here Paolo gives dompno Giovanni Petrignani a different tone (a surprise in the reader in the garden) with a dangerous joke and a playful and unexpected way of addressing his colleague. Paolo swore that he told openly to dompno Giovanni Petrignani and dompno Matteo Loctheroni the story of his rite with Contessa and Ceccarella; and then dompno Giovanni said to dompno Matteo: "You should do it, what Paolo did, son of Loctarono (Faceres tu hoc fili Loctaroni quod fecit Paulus )." And dompno Matteo replied, "God save me from that (Deus liberet me )" and was (Paolo thought) displeased. This little piece of litany Paolo remembered as having taken place behind Sant'Agnese.

Then the inquisition turned to Paolo's supposed creation of false stories of miracle. Those "false" miracles identified by place happened at Greccio. One cannot help noticing the places and kinds of religious practice that combine themselves in Paolo's life or in the inquisitor's mind: the anchorite's cell; the Portiuncula; the fraticelli; the third order; San Marone and Foresta; the women listening to the priest reading in the garden; and finally Greccio and what happens there, including the idea of miracle and uncontrolled sanctity—artifacts of belief and piety connected with "extreme" Franciscanism, artifacts of belief and piety farthest from magisterial and curial control, and from the kind of Franciscanism that sits in loggias before cameras and deals with judges in defining orthodoxy.

But it is also a Greccio far from, connected with but far from, Francis's and the companions' Greccio, and part of that distance is defined by time. Paolo told the inquisitor that he had spread broadly (disseminauit inter multos) the story that once Paolo was at the Franciscans'

(the loco ) at Greccio with Fra Appollonio and there were there two young friars, novices. Because of an abundance of snow they lacked bread; and because of that the novices wanted to quit the order. Fra Appollonio said to them, "Wait three days and the Lord will provide." Then on the third day without bread, when the novices were wanting to leave, there was a knocking at the door; and when one of the novices ran to the door the only thing he found there was a canister of bread, nothing else was around; and after the table was set (posita mensa [? they were sitting at table]), there was another knocking at the door, and one of the novices ran to answer, and he found there a wolf knocking with his paw (actually branca ). The wolf went away leaving a kid (crapaiolum ). This was the story, but at the inquest Paolo said that it was all false and that he had made it up to try to praise Fra Appollonio into sainthood.

And Paolo said that he had spread falsely another miracle about a certain queen who gave Appollonio necessities and that Appollonio had found in his camera a chest of queenly bread brought by an angel (Vnum Cassectum portatum ab angelo cum pannis reginalibus ). The mind or minds which composed these miracles used familiar props: the snow, the wolf, the bread, the angel. But the sets are oddly constructed: pushed by tiredness, torture, carelessness, the driving necessity to attack radical Franciscans? And this Greccio, wilder, more Abruzzese, than Francis's or the companions', still has camera, doors and tables, novices and an order.

On 26 July Paolo's inquest was again in session, again in the inquisitor's camera.^[29] Paolo was brought back to the Cintia story: in a bed in her camera, in her vineyard, lying unclothed on top of her, with his member in her member, but not to orgasm (and the protagonist of Paolo's inquest may well seem the male orgasm); then repeatedly with orgasm (but the use of the word corruptionem not accidentally darkens the meaning of orgasm). Again on 27 July Paolo talked of Cintia in the inquisitor's camera; he talked of his fingers moving under the covers one night in the house of Tommasello Martini Mictenessi at a time when Tommasello himself was there sick in bed.^[30] Then he talked again of Ceccarella and lying with her in the straw in a container (a naui ), in the house of Contessa, and of not intending to come to orgasm with her. And in another session on the same day in the same place Paolo swore to the truth of all he had said.^[31]

And again in the same place twice on the next day, 28 July, Paolo appeared before the inquisitor and talked of Contessa and Ceccarella

and the nauicella or nauicula in the house with straw in it.^[32] And he swore that all that he had confessed was true and stated of his own free will without fear or force. And again on the same day, but this time in the sacristy of the cathedral church, Paolo swore the same thing, and he said he had not been tortured by the inquisitor, that he had been treated mercifully by the inquisitor; and renouncing all further defense he put himself in the inquisitor's hands.^[33] This he did before twenty-three witnesses; they included ten men who were or would be canons of Rieti and the father of another: Corrado de Murro, Tommaso Secinari, Tommaso Cimini, Berardo Secinari, Giacomo di don Tommaso, Matteo di don Paolo, Matteo di don Angelo, Rainaldo de Piagge, Matteo di magistro Biagio, Angelo di don Paolo, and Don Caputosto. Then on 3 August Paolo was back at the inquisitor's camera at San Francesco talking of the undressing of Contessa and Ceccarella in Contessa's house and of the three of them together in the garden of dompno Giovanni Petrignani telling and confessing their story to Giovanni and to dompno Filippo de Crispiano.^[34]

But out of order in the document is talk of a different kind of event, the reuniting of the inquisitor's counselors on 30 July (a Saturday) in the foresteria of San Francesco (in loco fratrum minorum de Reat'in domo que dicitur foresteria ). Only six of these sixteen counselors had also been counselors on 18 July; and they included none of the counselors of 18 July who had disagreed significantly with the majority consensus. Present in the foresteria on 30 July were the episcopal vicar Francesco, Tommaso Secinari, Corrado de Murro, Giovanni de Canemorto (here identified as judex , present with three other men identified by the title judex , including Francesco de Murro), also the two podestà's judges who had been present on 18 July, the Franciscan custos of Rome as well as again the custos of Rieti, and again the Franciscan papal visitor, the canon Rainaldo de Piagge, the Dominican Berardo de Piagge, and two Augustinian Hermits from Sant'Agostino (Amatucio, and Angelo da Accumoli).

On 30 July there was, we are told, consensus among those counselors who were not members of religious orders, that is, among those learned in the law (the juris periti ), the clerks (clerici ), and the vicar of the bishop, about three points (super tribus puntis ): first that because of those things already confessed and discovered Paolo ought to be put to the final torture (et gomitibus extensus ) before sentencing; second that, even without further confession, because of the perverse and heretical dogma he had confessed he should be punished as a heretic; third that

he should be canonically punished as a heretic even if he renounced his heresy. The counselors who were members of religious orders agreed except that they said that Paolo should be tortured to reveal what he seemed still to conceal without the brutal and contorting torture described as tormento flactionis bracciorum uel exibitionis calcis or other similar tortures.^[35]

Then on 3 August (a Wednesday) the inquisitor, in the loggia before his camera, with witnesses, including some "familiars" of his own household present, commissioned those familiars to take Paolo Zoppo to the podestà of Rieti and his vicar so that they should diligently guard him so that he should not escape or be moved without the inquisitor's express license, and so that he should talk to no one except his guard, and so that he should not receive embassies from anyone, and so that nothing should be carried to him. The familiars of the inquisitor with the Franciscan notary took Paolo to give him to the podestà and fulfill their commission. But since the podestà was not at the time in the city they handed him over to the podestàs son and knight who conveyed him to the podestà's vicar.^[36]

From that point the inquisitor, driven, moved to the attack of his enemies, to those who opposed him, and most specifically to an attack on Giovanni de Bussatta (the father of the future vicar general) who had had, the inquisitor said, the audacity to make excuses for Paolo and his crimes of heresy and to say publicly that Paolo should not be detained and, out of love for Paolo, to say that he was innocent and without fault.^[37]

The presentation of Paolo to the podestà's son on 3 August took place less than three weeks after Ceccarella's first recorded testimony at Santa Scolastica on 15 July. After these intense weeks the persons of the major actors, Paolo and Contessa, disappear. The action changes. In the middle of the inquisitor's attack on Paolo's sympathizers the inquisitorial record breaks and jumps folios and then begins again. But it begins days later, on 8 August, a Monday, with different notaries present, and in a different place, in the church of Santa Maria di Croce in the territory of Leonessa (in terra Gonesse , sometimes Gonisse ) but still in the diocese of Rieti.

There and then the inquisitor sat and composed a citation for Contessa, fully and explicitly identified, and here called a confessed heretic. She should appear, within three days of the receipt of the citation, before the inquisitor at Santa Maria di Croce or, even with her absent, he would proceed to graver condemnations and penalties. The inquisitor

prepared the citation with care. It was sealed with the seal of his office, it was registered, it was notarized by the notary Pietro Gualterucci of Leonessa; and Pietro's copy was read aloud and listened to in a group, with the Franciscan Matteo de Planitia also reading. The citation was then entrusted to the inquisitor's messenger, or nuncio, Petrono Giovanucci, to take to Contessa's house in Rieti and to make sure that she was aware of its contents.^[38]

Two days later, on 5 August, Petrono was back at Leonessa, at Santa Maria di Croce, telling of the adventures of his trip. Carrying the citation and two other letters from the inquisitor, he had arrived at the Porta Conca, the gate in the middle of the north wall of Rieti. There he had found guards posted, by officials of the commune, specifically to prevent any person, citation, or letter sent from the inquisitor from entering the city. The guards, or one of them, had threatened Petrono with a raised plank. They had seized him and told him to undress: "Spolia te." They had put their hands under his clothes and harassed him; they had disarranged his clothes, even his breeches, and had undone his laces and removed his sword. This all had happened about noon with a lot of people whom Petrono did not know present, and then the notary Pietro di don Giacomo of Rieti had turned up. The guards, who had not found the inquisitor's citation and letters, then had taken Petrono off to those communal officials called "the six." And the six (illi sex ) had interrogated him and asked if he carried letters from that inquisitor of whom he was the messenger, nuncio. Petrono, out of fear, had answered no; and the six had dismissed him.

Dismissed, Petrono had gone to the Franciscans' to give letters from the inquisitor to Fra Berardo who had been his notary in Rieti but, there, Fra Berardo had refused to take them. Moreover the guardiano of the Franciscans' at Rieti had told him that "that day [that is, yesterday (hen )]" the six had ordered that he, Petrono himself, should not be allowed to depart unless the letters were found. Because of the danger to their persons the guardiano had gone to a secret place to read the letters; and "today (hodie )" he had told Petrono that, again to avoid danger, he had burned the letters, after having taken off the seals, in the same secret place at the Franciscans'. And again to avoid danger, Petrono, who had heard that it was generally said that the six had posted guards at all the gates just as they had at the Porta Conca, had left Rieti not by any gate but by going across the river (by the Franciscans'); and he said that in leaving he had been accompanied for a mile by two friars minor and two other men. Finally Petrono said that he had heard from

the guardiano and more generally from the friars and others at the Franciscans' and from other men in the city, that the six had ordered, in an order accompanied by heavy threats to the Franciscans, the Dominicans, the Augustinian Hermits and to the (secular) clergy, that no one should accept any letter from the inquisitor. The prominence, in the statement, of the orders of friars is noticeable.^[39]

On 12 August, a Friday, Fra Simone da Spoleto, the inquisitor, was again active, reacting formally, but not seemingly without emotion, to the events surrounding Petrono's unsuccessful mission. In the weeks between 12 August and 8 October, a Saturday, Fra Simone repeatedly sat at his bench of justice in the church of Santa Maria di Croce and issued documents and initiated actions that involved a significant segment of the clergy of the Leonessa area within the diocese of Rieti. He, the inquisitor, made himself the center of a network of messengers and notaries and witnesses, some of whom came to his court to report what was happening and being said in Rieti, twenty-five kilometers to the southwest. On his first recorded Leonessa Friday Fra Simone wrote an open and public letter to the official community of Rieti: to the podestà, his vicar, the capitaneo , the six, other officials "however titled," counselors, and the commune of Rieti. He rehearsed in general terms difficulties he had found in executing his duties in Rieti, including those that had made necessary his removal to Leonessa, and warned that those difficulties, including inhibitions of and threats to his messengers, must stop on pain of excommunication, interdict, and heavy fines. He demanded that Paolo Zoppo, whom he had left in the podestà's custody, be presented to him or to his deputies, the Franciscan Fra Matteo da Leonessa and dompno Giovanni archpriest of San Cristoforo, to appear before his tribunal at Santa Maria di Croce, and that Contessa, should she continue to ignore the inquisitor's mandates, be jailed. The inquisitor demanded of the Reatine governors a formal response by public instrument and special nuncio and placed them and their territories under punishments of excommunication, interdict, and fine from the time of his issuing his letter should they fail to comply with his orders.^[40]

At Mass on the great feast of the Assumption in the presence of the nobleman Ugucio de Corneto, royal vicar of Leonessa, and of Don Giovanni da Terni, the vicar's judge, of two priests of the church of Santa Maria di Croce, and of a multitude of clergy and laity, in the church of Santa Maria di Croce, the notary Brunacio de Cornalto (then a notary and clerk at the office of Riformanze in Leonessa) read the inquisitor's letter to the commune of Rieti in the vernacular and ex-

plained it clearly to his listeners. Similarly a group of clerics testified that they had presented the letter in various churches in the area, at Mass, on Sunday 14 August: Giovanni, archpriest of San Cristoforo de Posta Cornu in the diocese of Rieti, here identified as vicar of the bishop of Rieti in terra Gonesse , in the church of Santa Barbara in the territory of Leonessa; dompno Raynerio, parish priest (sacerdos parroccialis ) of the church of Santa Maria di Croce itself in that church; dompno Giovanni da Leonessa, rector of Sant'Egidio of Leonessa in that church; dompno Francesco; rector of the church of San Savino in Rieti diocese in that church; dompno Tommaso da Leonessa, rector of the church of Santa Maria de Cerreto in Rieti diocese in that church. All gathered at Santa Maria di Croce formally to report their actions before the inquisitor and his then notary the Franciscan Fra Giovanni da Cascia and a group of witnesses including the pievano of San Massimo of Leonessa within the diocese of Spoleto.^[41]

Then on 19 August, a Friday, again at Santa Maria di Croce, two men, one a priest of Santa Maria di Croce, testified that they, with a third companion, on the previous Tuesday, the day after the feast, had gone to Rieti and stayed there until "yesterday (heri )," and they talked of what was being said at Rieti and of the fact that the Reatines certainly knew of the inquisitor's acts. They heard Reatines discussing the inquisitor's processes in various places throughout the city, and they themselves talked to Reatines around the city about the inquisitor's processes against them which had been published in various churches in Leonessa, but the Reatines said that they did not care, and they disparaged the inquisitor, and some of them (whose names the priest did not know, he said) threatened the inquisitor and said, "If that inquisitor himself ever comes back we will do something [this and that (hoc et illud )] to him." And one of the priest's companions heard threatening Reatines say among other things that they would like to burn the inquisitor himself. The Reatines, the inquisitor was assured, knew of his actions.

Fra Simone, assured that the Reatine officials knew of his actions, proceeded to declare those officials contumacious, excommunicated, fined, and their territory under interdict. He further announced that he intended to make inquisition against them: to correct them as they should be corrected and to punish them as they should be punished. He announced this in front of a group of clerical witnesses from the area of Leonessa, which included the bishop of Rieti's vicar there, dompno Giovanni Petri, archpriest of San Cristoforo; and also an Au-

gustinian Hermit, Agostino da Leonessa; as well as Giovanni da Terni, judge of Ugucio, the royal vicar of Leonessa. And at this point Fra Simone pronounced the individual names of his prey. They begin high with Abiamonte de Lecto "the captain of the castle or the royal vicar in the city of Rieti or the captain for war of the city." And one should note the division between the royal vicar of Leonessa acting as a witness to the inquisitor's pronouncement and the royal vicar of Rieti named as one of its targets—not only because the presence and description of the vicars shows a diocese caught within the Regno, but also because the division describes something of the real and complex geography of royal and political power in the Regno, as the alignment of the bishop of Rieti's vicar in Leonessa and his vicar general in Rieti describes that of ecclesiastical and political power.

The name of the royal vicar is followed by the title of the podestà and then the name of Don Salomone de Betton', elsewhere identified as captain of Rieti, and then the six priors of the guilds (later called consuls of the guilds) listed by name and sestiere and then the title of their notary. Finally come the names of six men identified here simply as citizens of Rieti. The first four names arrest their reader's attention: Don Giacomo Leoparducii, Angelucio Jotii, Ceccho Jotii, and Giacomo Jotii—who one would guess, correctly, were Contessa's three brothers. And a party of her sympathizers forms in the document: Giacomo, who had defended Paolo because of his pathetic condition, and Contessa's family to which Giacomo may have been connected and whose interest in Contessa must have been in some part at least proprietary, and in her house, in which heretical acts were said to have occurred and which must have seemed vulnerable to the stone-by-stone destruction at times meted out to houses which had housed heresy.^[42]

Through late September and early October the inquisitor continued to sit at his banco in the church of Santa Maria, to collect witnesses and grievances, to build his case and his networks, and incidentally to draw an increasingly detailed map of Rieti and the northern part of the diocese through the record of his actions entered, sometimes out of chronological order, in the neat paper folios of the Vatican codex. On 15 September, a Wednesday, in the presence of his continual companion, the Franciscan friar Petrucio di don Francesco da Spoleto, and of Fra Giovanni da Rieti of the order of Santo Spirito (who was actually staying or stationed in the hospital at Leonessa), the inquisitor issued a formal and public citation to Contessa and the named officials of the city of Rieti including the gonfaloniere , Nardo di notaio Pietro, in which the

podestà of Rieti is also named, Don Razzante da Firenze, and the captain, Salomone, is given his patronymic "di Monaldo." The inquisitor caused the citation to be proclaimed with trumpet sounded by Vanni di Biagio, the bannitore , crier or herald, of Leonessa between the preface and the elevation of Mass.^[43]

On 15 September, too, a man named Bernardo Ferrarii from Venice (or just possibly Benevento), who lived in Rieti, testified at Santa Maria about the guarding of the gates by the six and the gonfaloniere Nardo; he said he had heard of it often and from many people, specifically when he was in the communal jail of Rieti, and particularly from one of the podestà's men (famulus ) called Sandro who said he had stood guard himself. On 16 September dompno Tommaso di Tommasone da Cumulata di Leonessa, a clerk of the diocese of Rieti, talked of the guarding and of Nardo, of a man named Jutio da Pendenza who brought a message from Rieti to Leonessa, and of someone who was offered a florin to take a message from Leonessa to Rieti.

On the same day, a Friday, dompno John Gilbertson from the city of "Sancte Floris de Ibernia," chaplain of the royal castle in Leonessa testified that the Sunday before (11 September) he had taken letters from dompno Giovanni di Pietro, the vicar of the bishop of Rieti in the territory of Leonessa, to Don Francesco, the vicar of the bishop of Rieti, to the place where he lived, the episcopal palace, where Don Francesco had wanted not to accept them. He had said: "Iste sunt littere inquisitoris; nolo eas recipere (those are letters from the inquisitor; I don't want to receive them)." And he would not have taken them, John said, if he had not first seen the name of the vicar Giovanni (who was a listening witness to John's testimony) on the letters.^[44]

On 17 September an Augustinian Hermit, Fra Stefano Petroni da Rieti, testified that he and his prior and other friars of their order had been forbidden to act as emissaries or messengers for the inquisitor. This witness knew things because he went from door to door (hostiatim ) in Rieti collecting alms. He personally knew of the guarding of the gates because he went, repeatedly, in a normal way, out to collect the elemosina canipe ; when he returned from the district of Lama he was stopped at the city gates and searched, as were other Augustinians. And to this testimony an Augustinian from Leonessa, Fra Martino di Oddone, joined two Franciscans as witnesses.^[45]

On 19 September two Franciscans from Monteleone gave testimony. They had gone as an embassy from the commune of Monteleone to the captain general of Rieti, and when they got to the Franciscans' at Rieti,

where they went to eat, the guardiano there said to one of them, who was in fact guardiano of his own house in Monteleone, that he had better watch out: "Caueas ne portes litteras inquisitoris." And in fact, as they ate, the notary of the six came to them, particularly suspicious, they said, because the lector of the Franciscans at Leonessa was himself a man who came from Monteleone (oriundus de Monte Leone ), and he had been sent by the inquisitor to read his process in Rieti. The notary took the Franciscan ambassadors from Monteleone to a gate in the city wall and ejected them. They were not allowed back in, but they walked around along the outside of the city wall until they came to the gate leading out toward Leonessa where was the castle of the captain, the royal vicar, to whom they bore letters. He there received them and explained to them more of the hostility of the Reatines to the inquisitor and that they, the Reatines, intended to start an action which would establish the fact that the inquisitor's process was based on falsehood; and the captain then said, "And I know it's false (et scio quod falsum est )."^[46]

On 20 September dompno Pietro Andreonis, formerly of Poggio Bustone, testified that he had brought the inquisitor letters from Don Francesco, the archpriest of Santa Maria di Canetra, vicar, and here called specifically vicar general, of the bishop of Rieti, "letters dated Tuesday"—that is, the same day in which he made it clear that he could not and would not receive letters from or execute orders sent by the inquisitor—saying "If you direct me to execute some order against the commune of Rieti I cannot do it without personal danger: [instead] I shall simply stay at home (ad domum propriam remearem )."

Then on 22 September the already mentioned Jutio di Nicola da Pendenza testified at the bench in Santa Maria. He said that in August he had been sent as messenger or ambassador by the officials of the commune of Rieti with letters telling the inquisitor to stop his actions against them and alleging the close, and so threatening, friendship between their commune and Leonessa. But on 22 September Jutio himself was confessing his fault, being and seeming contrite, and receiving absolution from the inquisitor so that he could again receive the sacraments. He was also telling the inquisitor news of Rieti and the opinions held there. The inquisitor's troubles in executing his office in Rieti had been brought about through actions of Contessa's brothers, Giacomo Leoparducii, and their allies. This was common belief and rumor in Rieti: publica uox et fama . And what, Jutio was asked, does publica uox et fama mean? And he answered, what is commonly said and by most of the people (quod dicitur communiter et a maiore parte gentis ).^[47]

On 24 September the inquisitor again cited Contessa and he also cited Giovanni Petrignani of Rieti to appear before him before terce on the following Monday (26 September). On that Monday he moved to a solemn and extended condemnation of the named officials of the city of Rieti, of Giacomo Leoparducii, of Contessa's brothers, and their named allies. They were contumacious and had ignored first, second, and third citations; they were aiders and abettors of heretics; and, contumacious and disobedient, they were now condemned to those punishments recited in the citations—they individually were fined 100 gold florins and excommunicated, and the city and district of Rieti were placed under interdict and fined 1,000 marks of silver. On 8 October the inquisitor's companion, from his own order and his own city, Fra Pietro (or Petrucio) di don Francesco da Spoleto, a man with a maintained patrician name which suggests familial devotion to Francis, testified before the inquisitor as did his companion, Fra Ludovico di Pietro da Monteleone. The two of them had been to Rieti to make sure that the officials of the city and the accused and condemned in the inquisitor's process were fully aware of what the inquisitor had done and of the nature and extent of their condemnation. They had presented themselves to the royal vicar, Abbiamonte (or Abiumonte), and read to him the communication from the inquisitor addressed to him. The two friars had presented themselves and read their documents on 30 September and on 1 and 2 October, and their presentation was witnessed not only by the vicar, hut by Don Giacomo Leoparducii, and two of Contessa's brothers, in the chapel of the royal castle at Rieti.

The friars also went to the Franciscans' at Rieti and, in the garden there, they told the guardiano of the place of the interdict. The guardiano said that the inquisitor's process was not valid because it was not made in the provincia romana of the inquisition (where the inquisitor's charge ran). But the friars said that it was indeed made within the provencia romana , because it had been acted in the church of Santa Maria di Croce in Leonessa, which was within the diocese of Rieti and so, according to the division of inquisitorial provinces, within the provencia romana . The city and diocese of Rieti, the guardiano was told, were under interdict. The friars then returned to Leonessa to announce and swear to the successful completion of their mission^[48]

On 21 October when the record for Fra Simone's inquisition recommences, he has established himself in the church of San Francesco at Viterbo and has collected around himself men from religious orders and clergy, judges and a notary, from its neighborhood rather than that

of Leonessa, thirty-five of them in the initial naming: Don Matteo, prior of Sant'Angelo and vicar of the bishop of Viterbo; the archpriest of San Lorenzo, the cathedral church of Viterbo; the priors of San Matteo in Sonza ("de Sunsa," and himself named Matteo), Santa Maria Nuova, and San Luca; two priest canons of San Sisto, two priest canons of Sant'Angelo, one priest canon of San Matteo, and one priest canon of Santa Maria Nuova; four Franciscans, two Dominicans, two Carmelites; two Premonstratensians (?) from Santa Maria della Verità, and four Benedictines (?) from San Pietro della Castagna (men who actually came from Orvieto, Florence, San Sepolcro, Gualdo, Sezze, Montefiascone, Tarquinia, Rome, and Vetralla, as well as—four of them—from Viterbo itself); six judges and doctors of law; a local notary. Present for the inquisitor's restatement of the case on 26 October was his old companion Fra Pietro (or Petrucio) di don Francesco da Spoleto, as well as a number of Viterbo priests, or priests living in Viterbo, like Nicola da Orte, chaplain of San Martino in Viterbo.^[49]

On 28 October, still in Viterbo, the inquisitor chose a new direction. He sent messengers to Federico de Murro (Morro), a citizen of Rieti who was podestà of Orte, and to his judges, notaries, and familiars who were from Rieti, and to any Reatine who happened to be living in Orte, ordering them all to see to the solemn publication of his acts and condemnations in Orte. The inquisitor ordered that his acts and citations be posted outside of the cathedral church of Orte and in other places where it seemed best to affix them, and that those Reatines against whom the inquisition was proceeding be cited to appear before him within fifteen days at whatever place he should be within the diocese of Viterbo or of Orte or of Orvieto. On 2 November, the messengers, one of whom was actually, like the inquisitor, from Spoleto, swore that they had accomplished their assigned mission, in the communal palace of Orte, and that they had attached the inquisitor's letter patent, with his seal on its dorse, outside the cathedral church of Orte.^[50]

From 2 November the inquisitor's record jumps to a February (but presumably back to February 1334) and to Tivoli, where the inquisitor's attention was focused directly on the fraticelli, who were quite surely the central target of his entire campaign. The first figure recorded testifying before him at Tivoli was the fraticello Fra Francesco da Assisi, more fully Francesco di Vanni da Assisi, who was staying in a place near Tivoli (in territorio Cole Comitis ). Francesco was also identified as Francesco junior because he was one of two fraticelli called Francesco da Assisi whom the inquisitor was investigating. The other, Francesco

da Assisi senior, was identified as, "was called," the guardiano of San Biagio di Castro Poli. The two men who bore their saint's name and who were under Fra Simone's inquisitorial scrutiny make clangingly evident the clash of values and models and action within the broader Franciscan community of 1334.^[51]

From Fra Francesco, Fra Simone extracted the common stories of fraticelli diversity. Fra Simone made Fra Francesco answer whether or not he had heard notorious fraticelli statements, where, and by whom. Fra Simone pushed toward the star of which Paolo Zoppo was perhaps a crazy and defective and potentially damaging satellite. Did Fra Francesco know anything that smelled of heresy? Not anything unless it was that he had heard from the fraticelli de paupere vita talking among themselves in lots of places and saying that Pope John was not pope and calling him Giacomo from Cahors; and he said that he had heard the fraticelli saying that the pope had cut off the head of the life of Christ, because he abolished the fraticelli and because he had published a decretal that said that Christ had had property, and saying that there was a "prophecy" that the Roman church is made a whore and had crossed the mountains the better to fornicate, and that the so-called friars minor were not the true friars minor but that the fraticelli were. Asked if he had believed these things Francesco said yes. Asked how long he had believed, he answered that he had spent more than five years in various places among the fraticelli and then he had believed. Asked if he had made any profession, he answered that he had been received and inducted by the fraticelli, and he had promised to follow the rule and the testament of Saint Francis, and he had sworn this on the Bible and the rule and the altar and in the hands of Fra Paolo da Assisi who was called the minister provincial in "the province of Saint Francis." This had been perhaps four years before and at Santa Maria de Rapichiano (Rapicciano) in the territory of Spello in the diocese of Spoleto. And asked who was the general of the order, Fra Francesco said that it was Fra Angelo Clareno da Fossombrone. In a few folios Simone has pushed his diverse witnesses and his book's readers back from the fumbling nudity of Paolo Zoppo to the generalate of Angelo Clareno. And this movement was recorded in the year 1334, during which Angelo fled from central Italy to rest in the safety of Robert the Wise's south and to prepare, in his own words, his escape from the prison of the body and the exile of the world.

Fra Francesco gave Fra Simone the names of eleven friars, beginning with the senior Fra Francesco da Assisi, four of them from Spoleto, from

whom he had heard these things. And Fra Simone, returning to the questioning on the same day, demanded to know where Fra Angelo Clareno had been staying and heard that it was at San Benedetto Subiaco. Fra Simone's big net in which Subiaco is caught with Angelo recalls (or predicts) his little Reatine net in which San Giovanni Evangelista was caught with Paolo.

But the Reatine connection becomes sharp and clear in the inquisitor's interrogation of 2 March. On that day Fra Simone's witness was the novice in the order of friars minor Fra Giovanni di Lodorono Alfani of Rieti—a son of Lodorono, like Giovanni Petrignani's companion in the garden of San Giovanni Evangelista, more specifically a son of Lodorono Alfani, in whose house had died Fra Rainaldo da Spoleto, who had, Paolo Zoppo said, taught Paolo how men and women lay naked together in Spoleto.^[52]

Fra Giovanni di Lodorono testified in the chapter of the Minors at Tivoli with Fra Gerald of Man, or perhaps Wales (Giraldo de Mananea ), acting as inquisitor's notary and recording his statements. Giovanni testified to hearing the sort of statements that Francesco da Assisi had heard; he had also heard it said that the established friars minor did not have the understanding or good conscience to observe the rule of Saint Francis to the letter and that they were not in a state of grace or salvation but rather of damnation. But among those badly spoken fraticelli who were servants to error, Fra Giovanni said, should not be included his brother, Fra Giovanuccio da Rieti, although the reported errors were common in the district of Rieti. When Giovanni was asked where he had been with these erring fraticelli, whose head was Fra Angelo, he answered, at Rome, and in Marino, and in places around Rieti.

On 18 March Francesco di Vanni da Assisi was again testifying before the inquisitor. He said that he had heard, near Tivoli, during the evening of the night between Christmas and the feast of Stephen, from Pietro da Lombardia the repeated bitter joke about Saint Anthony's and Saint Benedict's and Saint Francis's all having to be in hell not in heaven, or else they would have done something about the followers who bore their names, would have plunged them into the abyss. And in telling the story Fra Pietro had called the friars minor the fat friars (fratres minores quos vocabat fratres grassos ).^[53]

In the "fat" friars' attack on the "fraticelli of the poor life," the church and commune of Rieti were caught and, for us, exposed. Fra Simone's direct attack at Tivoli on the followers of Angelo Clareno displays the central purpose of his mission and thus reveals with contin-

gent clarity the subsidiary nature of his attack on Paolo, Contessa, and the commune of Rieti. But the inquisitor's questions about Reatine matters and the testimony he provoked with them, at least coincidentally, raked into view many elements in the physical and mental structure of the place.

If the observer of the Vatican manuscript moves back through its recorded documents, if he or she starts with the Tivoli testimony (and reserves for special use the statements and person of Fra Giovanni di Lodorono Alfani), he or she comes next in this paper passage to the Viterbo and Leonessa processes in which Fra Simone through his minions tried to approach and penetrate Rieti from the outside. The observer then becomes sensibly aware of Rieti as a walled (and rivered) place set within a more open, or at least more easily penetrable, diocese, in which were established vicars of the king in Naples as well as episcopal vicars, and through which could move representatives of the "fat" Franciscan inquisition established by the Roman pope in Avignon.

Although the year 1334 lies within a period of considerable confusion about political boundaries in those areas of Italy where the kingdom of Naples and lands under direct papal control touched each other, the inquisitorial material, with its royal Neapolitan vicars in the royal Neapolitan castles or palaces or fortresses, gives strong evidence of the dominant presence of Robert the Wise's Naples in the area. But that evidence is immediately countered by evidence of local and communal strength and independence as, for example, in the case of the two royal vicars who seem to stand divided between support of or at least apparent adhesion to the inquisitor in Leonessa and the commune of Rieti; and within the commune there is the power of faction of the sort we see when we are told that the action from Rieti is controlled by "the six" and their officers, themselves prodded by the local party of Giacomo Leoparducii and the Jotii brothers. The division between the royal vicars is echoed by, or echoes, that between the two episcopal vicars, the vicar general in Rieti and the vicar of the territory of Leonessa, as one stands witness to the inquisitor's Leonessan acts and the other stays in his lodgings in the episcopal palace and refuses to receive the inquisitor's letters and adds to his refusal rather salty statements that must have seemed impertinent to the inquisitor's ears, particularly from a man who had (our evidence seems to show) given him his complete support when the inquisitor was actually present in Rieti. In fact all of formerly cooperating Rieti seemed to have turned against the inquisitor, as the guardiano of the fat Franciscans at Rieti argues about diocesan and

provincial boundaries and as Reatine denizens argue that it is the inquisitor (and not his victims) who should be burned. The inquisitor's excommunications seem to have flown with less effect than his letters did (with exceptions, or at least one exception: Jutio sought to receive the sacraments again), this in spite of careful and broad publication and that in spite of closed gates.

The evidence for communal coherence and independence, and for penetration into and escape from small urban community, is abundant in the case, but its total message is as complex as is that, about the same matters, at an earlier stage, which can be gathered from the writings of Francis's immediate followers. The containing city of Orte was obviously a hospice fur Reatines, including ruling Reatines; they were available to the inquisitor in Orte, and they offered him connection with the city, Rieti, from which they had come and to which in the inquisitorial mind they still, in a significant way, belonged—even the citizen podestà, pretty clearly from the noble family of the rustic hill castro of Morro. The Franciscans of Monteleone, ambassadors of their own commune, were suspect to the Reatines because the lector of the Franciscans at Leonessa, who had been given a charge by the inquisitor, had come from Monteleone (oriundus de Monte Leone ).

Witness lists as well as behavior give evidence about the consistency of the clerical community. Certainly they show that a local clerical community was assumed to exist, and that within that general community there was also an assumed community not just among the members of individual orders of friars but among friars—Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinian Hermits, at least orthodox ones—more generally. The friars themselves, in this inquisition's towns, were by 1334 both local and foreign to the towns in which they lived. More settled, perhaps, than in the thirteenth century, they were still mobile. But their activities, or some of them, also tied together and made more communal the communities in which they lived, not just through their grand activities within their great churches but also, for example, through their begging, hostiatim , door-to-door, collecting and dispersing, as they moved, the vox publica , the rumors and gossip, which bound the community together or separated it into camps.

But there was also division among clergy and order and not just the flamboyant dispute between the "fat" and "poor" Franciscans. What, for instance, was the true position, what were the true attachments, of the guardiano of the Franciscans at Rieti in 1334? As interesting as any division within an order, moreover, was the connection among orders,

most interestingly and most famously, that connection centered in the great old Benedictine complex at Subiaco, which seems to have been as alive as Farfa seems to have been dead, and most particularly alive with "poor" Franciscans and particularly their leader Angelo Clareno.^[54] The Rieti tightly closed within its walls in the testimony of Petrono Giovanucci was placed within a Reatine territory clearly open to the influence of Franciscan Subiaco in the earlier testimony of Fra Giovanni di Lodorono Alfani. The inquisitorial record opens to view some part of the spiritual force of Angelo Clareno and again reminds its reader that Angelo's influence and attachments were not limited to men and women in the Franciscan order. In this connection one should recall that just a few years before the inquest, in 1328, it was Angelo's friend, the Augustinian Hermit Gentile da Foligno, to whose supplication the bishop of Rieti, Giovanni Papazurri, responded in founding Santa Caterina, the new convent of cloistered Benedictine nuns in Cittaducale.

Again pursuing the paper passage backward through the Vatican manuscript from those documents that record the inquisitor's activities in Viterbo and Leonessa to those that record his activities in Rieti itself, their reader is pushed into a display of Rieti structures, of the sets and props of inquisitorial and alleged heretical action: to clothes and doors and rooms, and furniture within rooms, benches and beds and containers of straw, to internal enclosures and loggias and gates, to external spaces and piazzas, to a jail (with gossip in it) and to a cemetery (with a "dangerous" friar buried in it), to where the butcher lived, to where the Franciscans lived, to where the bishop's vicar lived, to where the podestà lived. A physical, an intermittent physical, Rieti is set up before our eyes, the infrastructure, to make for a moment a false division of Reatine spirituality. And in the physical structure, on the stage, are placed individual figures connecting themselves with one another in expected and unexpected patterns and groups, agreeing and disagreeing, attracting and repelling one another, pretending to explain. In this little city they move through streets, or say they do, seeing people they do not recognize, and then at the other extreme they expose to us surprising, close connections.

In this setting appears the person of Giovanni Petrignani, priest of San Giovanni Evangelista. He is physically placed; he appears, listening to confession, in his garden near the center of Rieti, near the Duomo, reading there to a group of listeners noticeably including women. He jokes with a son of Loderono (or Eleutherio). The interest of this figure, of Giovanni Petrignani, increases when we recall that one of the cor-

respondents and friends of Angelo Clareno, and of Fra Matteo da Rieti, the sympathetic guardiano of the Roman convent of San Giovanni in Porta Latina, and of Fra Andrea da Rieti, who served as messenger between Angelo Clareno and Gentile da Foligno, was called Giovanni Petrignani (who has been identified by the editor of Angelo's letters as a friend of Matteo da Rieti and probably a layman sympathetic to the Spiritual Franciscans).^[55] Angelo Clareno's Giovanni Petrignani almost surely must be Rieti's priest of San Giovanni Evangelista, which gives a different, higher, and more serious tone both to his readings in the garden and to the inquisitor's poking into that garden. Seen by itself the inquisitor's record suggests that Giovanni Petrignani's position in Rieti was seriously threatened, but—and this is informative about Rieti, about local independence, and about the power of the inquisition—in 1350 Giovanni Petrignani will be both archpriest of San Giovanni Evangelista and a canon of the church of Rieti.

Actually from 1349 comes a full description of Giovanni Petrignani's prebend, the prebend which had been Tommaso Cimini's in 1307, with measured land of about 40 giunte, a noticeable part of which is in vineyard in Campo Ratino, San Pietro in Campo, and other places; and from land at Santa Rufina the holder of the prebend was to get each year five soldi and a chicken. Ten giunte were in Fiume Morto (on the road that went to the island hill [collem insule ]) and four in Casamascara—in the area where the chapter had once fought the Cistercians for drying land and where the lords of Labro still held lands. One piece of the prebend's land had once been held by the notary Pietro de Clausura. Before Giovanni Petrignani held this prebend, before he was a canon of the cathedral church but two years after the inquisition of Paolo Zoppo, in April 1336, Giovanni Petrignani had been the first of the witnesses listed in the will of the future bishop Tommaso Secinari, another actor in the Zoppo story. In 1358 then canon Giovanni Petrignani was given two soldi for singing Mass (with a deacon and a subdeacon who were given 14 denari) in the cathedral on the feast of the Assumption. In 1358 Giovanni was receiving commons including grain. He was alive in April 1359, but presumably not in June 1360. Whether Giovanni Petrignani had joked his way through the Black Death to more conservative attitudes or had brought fraticelli attitudes to the cathedral chapter, it is not possible to say, but he had clearly survived his brush with the inquisition.^[56]

Giovanni Petrignani teased his fellow-priest Matteo di Loctarono (or Lodorono or Eleuterio) whom he called, in his teasing, "fili Loctaroni,"

a way of naming which takes on a heightened significance read in the context of Angelo Clareno's correspondence in 1315 or 1316 with Francesco and Giovanni, nicknamed Citto and Vanne, "filiis Domini Lotaronis" of Rieti.^[57] Angelo wrote to the young men to urge them not to let the tears of their parents persuade them to give up the life they had chosen in imitation of Christ; in harsh words and phrases Angelo attacked the dangers of that damaging and containing parental love which would take the brothers back from their life with the Spiritual Franciscans. He quoted the severe words of Christ in Luke (11:27–28), when he responded to the woman who had said "Blessed are the womb that bore thee and the breasts that gave thee suck" with "Rather blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it." Further Angelo asked other friars to help Citto and Vanne, to take them to Pozzaglia, and to try to keep them from going home. It is complicated—people change. This Vanne has been thought to be the same Giovanni who (still or again a novice?) testified, cooperatively perhaps, before the inquisitor Fra Simone da Spoleto. Vanne's father is almost surely the same Lodorono or Lodoro in whose house in Rieti Paolo Zoppo's instructor Fra Rainaldo da Spoleto died. This branch of the Alfani family was clearly entangled with the Spiritual movement in the Reatine, and its entanglement gives the movement an enhanced local quality. The inquisition was clearly touching things and people at the respectable and powerful center of the city, people who were not in any contemporary conventional sense crazy or vile. The respectable and powerful connections of the inquisition's targets are seen again in the effectiveness of Contessa's brothers and in Paolo Zoppo's attempted flight to Tommaso Secinari, the future bishop whose seignorial family came from the Regno, then ruled by Robert the Wise, Angelo's protector.

Giovanni Petrignani's garden seems the center of spiritual intensity in the inquisitor's documents' narrative of Rieti, but the protagonist in the actual story, while it remains in Rieti, is Paolo Zoppo. This man of "vile condition," forced to confess, or say, that he had made a woman undress not really for pious reasons, but because he wanted to see her naked, forced to confess, or say, that he had polluted his anchorite's cell by libidinous activities with a dog, and forced to confess, or say, that there were women with whom he had had religious conversation with whom he had repeatedly and unsuccessfully tried to have sexual relations, this man was the figure whom the inquisitor Simone da Spoleto chose to make his Rieti heretic.

In choosing to make Paolo his heretic, Simone chose to make him,

or to recognize in him, a kind of "holy man," a weak perversion of a "holy man" perhaps, but recognizably that person. He was an urban holy man, caught in the frenzy, if that is not too strong a word, of early fourteenth-century urban movement—to the Portiuncula, to bed in the house next to the butcher's, to a cell next to an urban church, to discussions in a garden next to another urban church, a holy man caught in a world of urban mistresses and maids, in which a mistress felt that she could advise a maid about spiritual propriety and in which the mistress could become a Franciscan tertiary and the maid a Benedictine nun in an urban convent. He was a holy man who kissed the kiss of peace on a woman's mouth. The enclosed space in which Paolo's figure was created was fixed not just by its geography but also by its chronology; his story is a story of the 1320s and 1330s, in terms of Franciscan development, papal attitude, Neapolitan presence, the power of the six, the position of Alfani and Secinari in Rieti, the closing years of the episcopate of Giovanni Papazurri, the physical, social, and psychological structure of the city (including the Franciscan buildings, including loggia and foresteria, by the river).

The creation of the figure of the heretic suggests in shadow the creation of a figure of a saint. Moreover, one of the aspects of Paolo's supposed heresy was, it was claimed, that he in lying tried to help create a saint, presumably a fraticello saint. The story of his lies, which Paolo is led to confess, is an absurd one, disjointed and silly; but the distorted description of the props of sanctity, although surely deliberately foolish, suggests the kind of props which could be more wisely and resonantly used to establish the sanctity of a worthy figure. So Paolo Zoppo offers two false holy men to the viewer, himself, the perverter of the kiss of peace, and his "saint" Fra Appollonio of, or at, Greccio. And in the latter at least the reader recognizes something of the climate of the great and famous, and in all senses neighboring, saint, Pietro of the Morrone (Celestine V) as he is seen in his "autobiografia."^[58] They share the disjointed world of snowy mystery and hard mountain fact.

In Paolo's story a wolf, a beast repeatedly and naturally sensitive to Franciscan persuasions, returned to the area from which Francis had once driven wolves, knocks on a door where hungry novices eat, or do not eat, but in an almost suburban mountain hermitage. The wolf brings bread and then, the table set, presumably, returns with a second course, of meat—after God has perhaps been tempted: three days and no more without bread or the novices would leave, then at the last minute comes the, otherwise quiet, knocking friend. And this story is

followed by another of the lies, again about bread, this time brought by a queenly person. Bread is a natural substance for miracles, particularly Christian miracles. Cuthbert's bread and Anselm's bread indirectly evoke the Eucharist.^[59] Fra Appollonio's bread seems to evoke nothing. There seems a deliberate poverty in the stories' presentation; the events are made to appear simple wonders, signs of nothing.

The empty interstices that emphasize the isolation of the images of wonder in Greccio's domesticated snowy wildness are, no doubt, in large part the result of harshly diminishing inquisitorial animosity. But the broken emptiness is not entirely inappropriate fur a group dedicated to intense voluntary poverty. These images without resonance can, moreover, seem like limbs broken off the eccentrically controlled structure of the masterpiece of a strange, but again appropriate, genre, the "autobiografia" of Peter of Morrone, in which particles of blunt naturalism are suspended in a magically supernatural atmosphere and tied together by ringing bells and flying birds, a realm dominated by the Holy Ghost.^[60] The atitobiografia's hungry world is a world not only of mountains and castri but also of snow: et erat nix magna, et tunc ningebat (there was much snow, and then it snowed). The snow of the autobiografia also appears in stories of Peter's miracles; it dominates one of Paolo Zoppo's lies about miracles. But snow had not seemed important in the stories of Francis's companions; even in their Greccio, the place of Paolo's snowy miracle, it was grando , hail, not nix , snow, which devastated.^[61] Perhaps the companions' perception and sensibility remained Umbrian, and Paolo's have become Abruzzese. The two localities seem appropriate for the two spiritualities at a century's distance from each other.

But snow also enters the stories of miracles told about Filippa Mareri, the uncanonized but recognized saint of the Cicolano and its great family, who died on 16 February 1236. For the three days before her death "nubecula quaedam spissa et alba, sicut nix et quasi glomerata, stetit in claustro monasterii, videntibus cunctis et admirantibus (a little cloud, dense and white, like snow and shaped into a ball, rested in the cloister of the monastery, and was seen, and wondered at, by everyone)."^[62] The snowball cloud departed when the white-clad soul of the saint was carried by the Holy Spirit into heaven—and, the tale of the wonder continues, there were at the time no other clouds around the monastery. The story is recorded as one of the particles pretty obviously gathered for the saint-making of Filippa, a precursor of the process mocked by Paolo's inquisitor when he extracts from Paolo his "lying" stories of Fra Appollonio's miracles.

It was a process, this interested promotion of sanctity, sufficiently common to be joked about in a period well before the telling of Paolo's stories, and for the jokes to he recorded by the saints' promoters—or at least this was true in the case of the holy Roman patrician Margherita Colonna who died in 1280. A scoffer in a Margherita miracle story, when he found that a physician he sought was off on a pilgrimage, with a Colonna, to places in a Colonna-dominated part of Lazio connected with Margherita's holy life, complained that her noble family was trying to shoot her into heaven.^[63] These stories promoting sanctity formed a part of the developing rite and rule of papal canonization in which the exact details of miracles as well as of holy lives had increasingly to be produced in authenticated form and able to withstand the probing of inquisition or inquest. The peculiarity in Filippa's candidacy for official sanctity is that the case for her, at least as it now remains seems to have been prepared so slackly.

Filippa's life, insofar as it can be reconstructed with any security, looks like this. She was born in about 1190 in the Cicolano, the third child of Filippo, baron of Mareri, and his wife, Imperatrice. From her early youth Filippa wanted to know more of God, and fortunately she was taught about God by a certain chaste man "learned in the Scriptures." Filippa began to despise "the world." She resisted and opposed her family's many plans for a noble marriage and sought instead to preserve her virginity. Since she had no other place to retire, she imprisoned herself in a room within a family palace and lived there as in hermitage or as a monaca in casa . But because of the tumultuous behavior of members of her family and its household, and particularly that of her brother Tommaso, she could not find sufficient quiet at home, and so in the society of other serious women she fled up the mountainside to a cave above Mareri, where she lived with her women in a simple community.

Filippa's brother, Tommaso, was, however, inspired by God and changed his attitude toward her. He begged her to come with her band of holy women to the church of San Pietro of which he held the patronage and which he offered to her for her to hold freely. San Pietro became the women's monastery, and they established in it a custom of life based on that of Saint Clare of Assisi at San Damiano. The monastery's freedom and exemption were guaranteed by a "public instrument" drawn up for Tommaso; and Filippa petitioned to have confirmation of his grant from the church of Rieti (que est caput diocesis ) and the Roman curia. There, in the monastery, Filippa lived; and on the

night that she died, it was later written, "a resounding voice rushed through the castles, castri, and villages [of the Mareri Cicolano] saying, 'Saint Filippa is dead.' " And in the morning a crowd—men, women, clerics—with lighted candles came to the monastery shouting, "Saint Filippa, Saint Filippa."^[64]

Any account of Filippa's life must stay both tentative and spare because of the particular nature of the surviving evidence about her, evidence as difficult to use as is that about Paolo Zoppo but for very different reasons. The oldest, at all serious, biographical account of Filippa is her leqenda . Its nine lectiones or readings do not now seem to exist in an edition earlier than that which was printed in 1545.^[65] To tell when the legenda was actually written does not seem possible. Most of the quite vague detail with which it attempts to give tone and taste to Filippa's sanctity seems so generic and commonplace that, except for chronology, geography, family connection, gender, and very general type, it cannot be seen to describe the specific way of living of a specific person. Filippa is presented as a family saint who resists marriage, retires, attempts a rather experimental group life in a high-country cave, and then accepts the communal life of a convent which adopts Franciscan usages.

The outline of the life presented is in a number of ways similar to that of the later Margherita Colonna, who, however, came from a more cosmopolitan, urban, and powerful family, and whose two vite are full of evocative and exactly descriptive detail: this difference in detail can quickly be seen, for example, in a comparison of the ways in which the two) saints show their love of God through charity to the poor.^[66] Margherita's life and her miracles exemplify the style demanded by the evolving process of canonization or by the taste that made that process necessary. But Filippa's is an undeveloped example of a Margherita type of sanctity; and the specific connection between the two) lives is made in one of the Margherita vite in the recording of a wonder which occurred after Margherita's death. The Franciscan Fra Bartolomeo da Gallicano was in Assisi on a vigil of Saint Clare. Bartolomeo, thinking of the sermon which he would preach on the feast, the next day, to the sisters, was walking, and then stopped and drowsed and dreamed in the cloister of the friars. He dreamed that he saw a group of blessed virgins walking. Among them were not only Clare and Margherita, but "a certain virgin, Filippa by name, distinguished because of her family but even more because of her sanctity"; and it was Filippa who explained the significance of the virginal group to Fra Bartolomeo.^[67]

The Margherita life makes explicit the idea that both saintly women belonged to the same caterva , the same troop or company, of virgins. Possibly Filippa's life influenced Margherita's; possibly Margherita's written lives influenced Filippa's legenda . The sphere of Colonna political and spiritual influence and interest in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries included the Reatine; transmission to and from the Colonna was possible. The Colonna presence was suggested not just by the presence of Giovanni Colonna in Rieti, and by Giacomo Colonna's patronage of the Reatine canon, Bartolomeo di don Rainaldo de Rocca, but also by the Colonna involvement with the locally persuasive Angelo Clareno. Angelo was tied to Subiaco and so was the cult of an earlier local cave saint which may have helped form Filippa, or legends about her. The saint, Chelidonia of the cave, was believed to have come from the Cicolano, and according to local tradition actually from Pescorocchiano, and to have lived and died (in 1152) and been buried in a cave at Morraferogna, a place between three and four kilometers from Subiaco and then locally within the diocese of Tivoli.

Filippa fits into a set of hagiographic conventions in a way that is related to, but obviously different from, Paolo Zoppo's historical figure's being formed, in significant part, by a series of inquisitorial questions and conventions. In the first lectio of the legenda Filippa's pregnant mother received a visit from a marvelous anonymous pilgrim bearing a significantly flowering palm. The legenda tells us that the young sacredly educated Filippa retreated to a cave, but that she, Martha as well as Mary, improved it so that it would be a more appropriate place to live, then with her sister, many nieces, and other noble women came down to her new monastery, that she was obedient to the church and to her spiritual father, the Franciscan Fra Ruggero, that she humbled herself and fasted, and that she was generous to Christ's poor and worked wonders.^[68] But the legenda seems to be so generalized (except for its local names) and could, with its appended miracles, he so late that its reader might be tempted to believe that no Filippa had ever existed outside of its pages, if the physical evidence of her existence was not so palpable, so heavily apparent on the land.

The monastery itself and its village were moved up the hill from the banks of the Salto when the artificial Lago di Salto was created and the relic of the saint was carried from the old monastery to the new on 4 July 1940; when the convent was flooded (plate 34), the nuns left it and continued their lives on the the hill.^[69] They carried with them (or had had carried before them) the saint's heart and the saint's cup and their own

sixteenth-century frescoes. They also carried their archives, which included, and include, among much else, a 1231 letter of grace from Gregory IX (while he was staying in Rieti) to Filippa and her nuns and a 1247 letter from Innocent IV to the abbess and nuns granting an indulgence of forty days on various feasts including that of Santa Filippa herself.^[70] The archives also include Bishop Rainaldo de Labro's letter of 23 November 1231 describing his consecration of the new church of San Pietro di Molito on that day and a grant by Anfelice di Rainaldo de Turre of all of her goods to Filippa the second abbess of the convent on 1 September 1336.^[71] With slight interruption and some change (including the grand change of the nuns' theater from cloister to world in 1929), the monastery and cult of Santa Filippa have continued from her own time to the present.^[72] In the twentieth century, paper banners proclaim from their airy fluttering or their fixed positions pasted on local walls: La Santa Baronessa and La Santa Del Cicolano.

The nature of Filippa's continued saintly presence is suggested by a comparison of the story of her heart with the story of the heart of another central Italian holy woman, Chiara da Montefalco, who died in 1308. By the light of dawn on the morning after her death the nuns of Chiara's convent discovered that her heart, opened, contained the cross of the crucifixion and the instruments of the passion. Chiara's heart contained, physically, the evidence of her having carried in life the death of Christ in her heart (although one male witness for her canonization inquest, who was a Franciscan as she was not, suspected a mechanical implant).^[73] Filippa died in 1236. No details of the manner of her heart's conservation in the years following her death are available; but in 1706 it was found intact. It remains to give comfort to the afflicted.

To Filippa's legenda in its printed edition are appended three sets of miracles. Although the miracles are also relatively mute, they give, at least superficially, a stronger sense of closeness to the saint than does the legenda , because they are thick with the detail of personal name and specific place and because the record of them talks twice, in a truncated way, of how they were known and have been recorded. In this the miracles recall the parts of the legenda which seem to come closest to providing real evidence of something outside itself and its genre when it talks, in the eighth lectio , of Filippa's powers and, in the sixth and ninth lectiones , of Fra Ruggero, Filippa's spiritual adviser and a witness of her death. Fra Ruggero's position in the legenda suggests (perhaps was meant to suggest) that he might have written the legenda or written

something from which the legenda was adapted or been the source of information and ideas included in the legenda .^[74] He, like the nuns' having adopted a Damianite model, brings Filippa into a Franciscan net, and his presence helps interpret those words of the legenda that (in the third lectio ) talk of Filippa's being formed, instructed, by Saint Francis and "other contemplatives"—words that have been taken to mean that Francis came to Mareri and talked to Filippa or in her hearing.^[75] Two of the legenda 's wonders are specific: the daughter of the nobleman Bernardo da Valviano, Margherita by name, had an infirmity which distorted her mouth terribly and which with Filippa's intercession was cured; Filippa's niece, Imperatrice, daughter of Ruggero de Montana, had entered her monastery but Imperatrice's brothers and Tommaso de Mareri (Filippa's brother and the male protagonist of the legenda ) quickly came to the monastery and demanded that Imperatrice, unwilling, return to them, but as she was being returned, and as the women prayed and lamented, the Holy Spirit fixed Imperatrice to the ground so the men could not move her.^[76]

Most of the appended miracles are recorded in very brief narrative patches. They are not reinforced with the sort of verisimilitude of detail which historians have come to expect of stories from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that attempt to establish sanctity. The second and longest of the three clusters of miracle stories is introduced by a statement that says that the compiler will not attempt to list all of the holy woman's miracles but that he will write down some that are recorded by a notary (manu publica sunt notata ) and attested by appropriate witnesses (testibus idoneis approbata ).^[77] This witnessing would of course heighten the stories' credibility and make it seem more probable that they were actually prepared for a formal canonization process. But no notary's name or subscript remains with the document, and there are no lists of witnesses except in the sense that each story's protagonist is a witness. The list itself suggests carelessness; of the twenty-three stories in the second group of miracles, two clearly refer to the same person and incident.^[78] The stories seem to have led to no canonization process. Superficially the stories' carelessness may make them seem untrustworthy. But although the detail may seem inadequate, what later inventor would have done a job so badly, would have included believable names but almost no authenticating, and easily inventible, detail?

The three miracles of the first group, wonders really, are connected with the saint's death. They are the most detailed stories. One is the snowball story. Another tells of what happened to "a famous preacher

in the order of friars minor," Tommaso da Civitella d'Abruzzo, on the night of Filippa's death. He was praying in the church of San Francesco in Assisi on the night of Filippa's death and he saw her soul traveling to heaven. On the following morning he told the story to the friars; and later it turned out that he had seen Filippa in the actual hour of her dying. The other story is of an Abruzzese baronial couple, Bernardo d'Ocre and his wife, people who had founded Santo Spirito and would found Sant'Angelo d'Ocre, and who were staying on the night of the saint's death at "Poggio Santa Maria." The baron saw a globe of fire lighting up the sky, particularly over San Pietro di Molito (of which the baron could be sure because of its closeness); and at the hour of the saint's death he saw it ascend to heaven. The baron understood and went back to tell his wife and household what he had seen and that Filippa was dead.^[79]

Of the twenty-three miracles in the second cluster, actually (because of the repetition) twenty-two, twenty are specifically connected with the saint's tomb. A priest (with scabies almost to the point of having leprosy) is only said to have prayed to the saint, and a man with a contracted arm has relics held over him, but probably at the tomb. In one of the more extended little stories a certain girl from Rieti city (puella quaedam de civitate Reatina ), named Altadonna, who had for three months had a contracted hand and foot and lost her speech and had set out for the saint's tomb, was cured before she actually got there.^[80] The suggestion of movement caught in Altadonna's story is visible again in another of the slightly extended narratives (this one of thirty-nine words): Gemma the daughter of Accardo (presumably Azzardo) and wife of Pietro Rainaldi, but of place unspecified, went wandering about for five years and more, insane and without sense and practically naked (ibat vaga et insana et quasi nuda ac sine sensu ).^[81] But for the most part the sense of movement in the stories is restricted to the mention of the attracting tomb and the place of origin of the person healed (when place is mentioned). These points, however, do prick the outline of a neighborhood. One of the seekers, a Pietro Capocci, came from as far away as Vicovaro (in the diocese of Tivoli) and, healed, returned to his patriam .^[82] Two came from Rieti. All the others, whose place of origin can be ascertained, came from the extended neighborhood of San Pietro where the convent was: three from Rigatti; one from Pescorocchiano; one from Oiano; one from Vallebona; one from Borgocollefegato; and one, a famulus , from the monastery itself.

The twelve postulant women, of whom two are called girls, and the

ten men (of whom one is a senex and one a priest) bring sicknesses and deformities to the tomb: two cases of loss of sight; four cases of fever; two possessions by demons; a sickness in the throat; a "celsus" in the forehead with bleeding; a migraine severe enough to cause loss of speech; the five-month wanderer; an amnesiac epileptic; and eight cases of whole and partial paralysis (including Altadonna's pretty clear results of stroke), crippling pain, and growths.

The fourth group of miracles begins with four miracles connected with the wooden cup, still preserved, which, according to the eighth lectio , Filippa carried about with her when she prayed in church so that neither her tears nor her spit (because the force of nature sometimes made her spit) would dirty the floor of the church (a niceness that rather primitively recalls Francis's interest in the physical cleanliness of church).^[83] The first two miracles in the group were worked for two Franciscans, Palmerio da Magliano and Paolo da Rieti; both had terrible abscesses, both drank water that had rinsed Filippa's cup, and both were cured. The second two cup miracles were worked for women of the Mareri family: Illuminata the daughter of Francesco, who could have been abbess Illuminata, and who suffered in the throat; Caterina the daughter of Giovanni, who is identified as an abbess and may have been that Caterina who was presiding over the monastery in 1295 and 1301, and who suffered in the lip.^[84] The agent of these miracles was an object which had been closely connected with the live Filippa. Their beneficiaries were people close to her not necessarily in time but in order and family.

The three final miracle stories are connected with the four that precede them not through the agency of the cup but through their having been preserved by memory and speech, not by previous writing.^[85] In one of these stories a man called Giacomo "de Marerio," who seems to have had epilepsy and for whom no medicine worked, fasted on the vigil of the fiesta of Santa Filippa and was cured. In a second story an unidentified man from Santa Rufina, who suffered from a similar affliction and for whom also no medicine worked, vowed to make an image of Santa Filippa and to fast on her vigil, and he too was cured. In the third story a woman called Rainaluttia from Fara, in the Sabina, near Farfa, who was crippled, visited Filippa's tomb and was cured.

The strange and uneven structure which is the record of the life of Filippa Mareri, the sturdy richness of relic, land, building, people, cult, archival document, combined with the fragility of legenda and miracle, can seem too unmanageable for generalization or interpretation. But in

fact the complex does offer to its observer a figure, Filippa, in some significant ways describable. She was a baronial country woman who was, in life and death, surrounded by her own family: in life she lived in their places, traveling little, up and down a hill; and in her death she, "glittering with miracles (corruscans miraculis )," as the legenda hyperbolically states, scattered those miracles among her relatives and neighbors. To those neighbors should be added members of the Franciscan order, the order which captured this traditional cave virgin and domesticated her within itself.

The differences between the woman saint and the man heretic, although both were tied to the Franciscans and to the diocese of Rieti, are many and obvious. The factors which can help explain those differences are also many and obvious. To begin with, although sometimes a man or a woman may have become one or the other, heretic or saint, almost by chance, a shake of the dice, once his or her status was accepted, the mode of preserving his or her memories depended very much on that status. Heretics did not work miracles for the orthodox. Shrines and monasteries were not built above their bones, nor if they had been would they have received papal privileges, been joined to illustrious orders, or produced pious anecdote and hagiography. Paolo has only his hostile inquest; Filippa has a mass of paraphernalia.

Had Filippa, or rather the memory of her, been subjected to an expert inquisition-inquest for canonization, the things known about her would have balanced better with those known about Paolo. But Paolo was examined by a very professional inquisitor, and the material gathered to support Filippa's cult seems pretty clearly the work of amateurs, at least if one excepts the legenda . Filippa was a rural woman of high status, a female member of a very major family from the topographically rough southern, Neapolitan, part of the diocese. Paolo was a man of little status, vile, from the city, the, in principle, papal commune of Rieti. The two people had connections, very different connections, with the chapter of the cathedral of Rieti: Filippa through her Mareri family; Paolo through his unclear, and perhaps very distant, at least attempted, attachment to Secinari and Alfani and through the involvement of canons in his inquisition.

In spite of the necessity for being very cautious in discussing chronological cause, a reader must believe that a part of the difference between the two was chronological. The Franciscans to whom the two figures were, or became, tied were very different; the order was very different

in the two periods. Filippa was involved in forming some sort of group of holy women which was eventually shaped into a house of the new order.^[86] By Paolo's time the order was so developed, and fragmented, that its apparatus appeared even in the hermitage of Greccio.

City heretics certainly existed, and were sexually active or said to be, before the time of Filippa, but the change in location, in action, in status (or its description) from Filippa to Paolo is not uncharacteristic of the change in time—from the baroness moving up and down the family mountain and resisting marriage, to the denizen of Rieti scooting about its streets and onto pilgrimages in search of women to lay on beds and benches (and it may be worth noting sexual acts of which Paolo is not accused—nothing with another male—and a potentially vulnerable Rieti group not tarnished by connection with him—the Jews). The details of Filippa's and Paolo's recorded behavior, the behavior of these two protagonists, brackets a lot of the observable and thinkable behavior of the people of the diocese of Rieti in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. And one aspect of the bracketing is chronological.

It is instructive, or at least pleasing, to rehearse in one's mind the differences between the quiet that holds the hill and the frenzy that scratches the town, the differences between the ways in which they are described. Think of the two heroes sexually: Filippa with her essentially unimagined grave chastity; Paolo with his constantly provoked concern with orgasm. What they do with their love-expressing hands, the liquids that exude from them, the nature of their friendships, the places they go, and always the stages and sets through which they move and the props they hold, are different. And the greatest difference of all, surely, is in the detail that is reproduced around them.

Paolo's life of sin is intricately described. It is bursting not only with movement but also with objects—straw, doors, beds—and with words, quoted, and with names given, and with attitudes investigated. The religion that Paolo perverts is much more elaborate, much more intricately explored, than that which Filippa personifies. It is difficult to imagine Filippa or any of the other characters in her story sitting in the urban garden of a priest from a collegiate parish, with other women, listening to a man like Giovanni Petrignani read.