Biography

Frances Andrews’ research and teaching focuses on the history of late medieval and early renaissance Italy, with particular emphasis on cities, religion and the church. She has often found herself researching those at the margins of categorisation, from heretics who acquired papal approval or successful mendicant friars threatened with suppression, to monks and friars working as urban treasurers.

Project Summary

Crowds flocking to hear and touch charismatic living individuals were a regular feature of saint-writing in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as were holy women and men seeking to hide or downplay their special virtue. Challenges to these virtues, however, forced them to defend their status, not unlike heretics compelled by inquisitors to defend both actions and beliefs. This connection is transparent in the anonymous Legenda beati fratris Venturini, c. 1347, the vita of a Dominican friar, Venturino da Bergamo (d. 1346), who led a peregrinatio or comotio from Bergamo to Rome in the spring of 1335.  A composite text, the Legenda includes the transcription of fra Venturino’s self-defence against the inquisition for heresy and disobedience to which he was subject in Avignon in June 1335 and an account of him as a putative saint by one or more Bologna Dominicans. Using the Legenda as its starting point, this project explores the genre of ‘auto-hagiography’ and its intersections with inquisitorial investigations in Italy and England c. 1340-1440.