Overview

We know much about the Italian city states - the ""communes"" - of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But historians have focused on their political accomplishments to the exclusion of their religious life, going so far as to call them ""purely secular contrivances."" When religion is considered, the subjects are usually saints, heretics, theologians, and religious leaders, thereby ignoring the vast majority of those who lived in the communes. In ""Cities of God"", Augustine Thompson gives a voice to the forgotten majority - orthodox lay people and those who ministered to them. ""Cities of God"" is bold, revisionist history in the tradition of Eamon Duffy's ""Stripping of the Altars"". Drawing on a wide repertoire of ecclesiastical and secular sources, from city statutes and chronicles to saints' lives and architecture, Thompson recaptures the religious origins and texture of the Italian republics and allows their inhabitants a spiritual voice that we have never heard before.

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Reviews

""Augustine Thompson's Cities of God is a masterful introduction to the vibrant religious culture of the Italian republics in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries."" - F. Thomas Luongo, The Medieval Review ""This brilliant, innovative, challenging, and often surprising book lays out every conceivable aspect of the religious lives of citizens of the medieval Italian commune. It is also a fascinating exposition of the unexpected ways in which civic communes of central and northern Italy from the late twelfth to the early fourteenth century were indeed 'Cities of God.'"" - William Bowsky, History: Reviews of New Books""

Augustine Thompson's Cities of God is a masterful introduction to the vibrant religious culture of the Italian republics in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. - F. Thomas Luongo, The Medieval Review This brilliant, innovative, challenging, and often surprising book lays out every conceivable aspect of the religious lives of citizens of the medieval Italian commune. It is also a fascinating exposition of the unexpected ways in which civic communes of central and northern Italy from the late twelfth to the early fourteenth century were indeed 'Cities of God.' - William Bowsky, History: Reviews of New Books

Author Information

Augustine Thompson, O.P., is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and History at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Revival Preachers and Politics in Thirteenth-Century Italy (1992) and, with James Gordley, Gratian: The Treatise on Laws with the Ordinary Gloss (1993).

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