Ph.D. Candidate Noah Cole on Researching Medieval Sermons on Factionalism
I came to FSU as an undergrad, and I got into medieval history by accident. I signed up for a class on medieval Italy, and I got drawn to the history of the Middle Ages. I am now in the 4th year of my Ph.D. and am hoping to defend my dissertation in 2027.
I study 15th-century Italy, in particular preaching and political theory. I see the two as closely connected. In northern Italy during the Middle Ages, it was the preacher’s job to explain to lay people how they ought to behave, to follow a Christian matrix. Rulers too needed to be good Christians, as good Christians would do good politics while bad Christians would do bad politics.
What I am specifically interested in is factionalism which was a widespread phenomenon across northern Italy. Due to weak central states, powerful families seized control of various arms of the government and then used the government to empower their own lineage and disempower their enemies. To make that happen, the factions employed street violence, rumors and gossip, anything to damage a rival’s reputation or destroy their access to power. I discovered that several preachers of the time had written about this problem, and I am collecting sermons that discuss factionalism to examine how preachers understood political conflicts and their causes.
It has taken me several years to get to this research topic. In undergrad, I was interested in Civic Humanism. Humanists were these erudite individuals who were obsessed with the culture of ancient Rome and its way of living. They tried to recover the glory of the ancient past and emulate it in their present. To achieve that they revolutionized the educational curriculum, and tutored monarchs and others in how to be a classically virtuous ruler. Some historians have seen these humanists turning to politics as the birth of modern political theory. This approach has been criticized since, but for me in undergrad it was a fascinating topic.
When I started my master’s program and began to look for a thesis topic, I realized that my Latin was not good enough to read the humanists in the original. But I found some works by preachers who were addressing the same themes as the humanists – just in less complex grammatical sentences. These preachers, often called "observant preachers," were all about plain language. That made translating their sermons for me much easier and allowed me to uncover their thoughts on politics. I started studying their sermons which contrasted nicely with the humanist material I had read before.
For the longest time, I wanted to write my Ph.D. dissertation on both traditions: the humanist political tradition as compared with the preaching political tradition. I still want to work on both – but that might be more a subject for book number 2. For my dissertation, I slowly narrowed the topic until I had defined my Ph.D. project as being an analysis of the sermons on factionalism by observant preachers.
The sermons I am working on are in Latin. Most of them were actually preached in the vernacular but we do not have a vernacular version for them. I'm interested in the Latin sermons because I think when something was written in Latin, it was intended for an enormous readership. Everybody learned in the 1400s could read Latin – but only a fraction of this group could read Italian. So, writing something in Latin was very intentional. One had a broad readership in mind.
The first two sermon collections I worked on were by Saint Bernardino of Siena and James of the March who was a follower of Bernardino. I did my master’s thesis on Bernardino, arguably the most famous preacher of his day. There are multiple monographs written on Bernardino in English, and the sermons of James have been edited by Italian scholars. In order to access further sermons, I had to go on research to Italy. During my stay in Bologna, I found the rest of the sources my dissertation is based on, in many cases with the help of Italian scholars working in the field.
For my dissertation, I have collected six major sermons whose titles all state that they cover the problem of factionalism. I am planning on doing a case study on each sermon. However, there are ca. 20 more sermons whose topics are thematically related to factionalism without putting that word in the title. Most of them deal with emotions and practices associated with factionalism like anger, hatred, and violence, which all affect how an individual relates to their neighbors and undermines a charitable outlook on life. If I have time, I will write an analysis of these sermons as the second part of my dissertation. If not, I will explore this aspect when I turn the dissertation into a manuscript.
Traveling to Italy and working in Italian archives was both exhilarating and very humbling. I had begun learning Italian during my master’s program but living and researching in Italy was a different matter. I had not realized how much specialized vocabulary I would need to work in an archive, even just to understand instructions about using different tools to prop up or hold open documents!
The other challenge I encountered was medieval handwriting. I had received a little bit of training in paleography but when I opened medieval manuscripts, I realized that I could only read some of the words but not all. Additionally, preaching Latin is heavily abbreviated. So, not only was I struggling to identify the letters in the words, but not all the letters were written out. I used the Lexicon Abbreviaturarum (1899) by Adriano Cappelli for decoding standard abbreviations, but everybody used their own abbreviations at the time – and for those I needed help from Italian scholars who took time out to work with me.
I had applied for a Fulbright grant the year before I went on fieldwork, and while I did not get it, the application process had put me in touch with Dr. Pietro Delcorno, who had agreed to be my local sponsor. Dr. Delcorno also works on preachers, and he helped me identify a lot of sources in online repositories and databases. Through networking at conferences, I got in touch with Dr. Giacomo Mariani, another preaching specialist, professor as well as archivist. He helped me navigate the Italian online databases. I was more used to working with American libraries, but because libraries in Italy have been archiving their sources since the Middle Ages, they have many legacy ways of cataloguing their materials.
In Italy, I also went to a class on paleography every other day, which helped me with decoding handwriting but also exposed me to instruction in Italian which was super helpful. The instructor, Dr. Maddalena Modesti, was very supportive of my efforts to read medieval handwriting. With her help – and that of many more, I found a lot of materials and got hands-on training in how to read it.
Since then, I have been to a manuscript boot camp at Wroclaw University in Poland. The focus there was on learning more about colophons in medieval manuscripts. A colophon is an insert by a scribe identifying himself as the person who copied a part of the manuscript, often including biographical and other details. Wroclaw University library has a lot of manuscripts, and the workshop made me realize the importance of colophons for tracing the history of manuscripts, where they were created and by whom. It helps in tracking the transmission of ideas.
Once I am done with my current project, I would like to move on and work on Florentine history. I am interested in analyzing a specific source, an archive of secret speeches given at government meetings over a hundred-year period. These are called the consulte e pratiche. I would like to contrast those speeches with the sermons that I am working on right now to see what people at the very top of the Florentine government were saying about factionalism. Florence was famously factional; we just need to look at the rise of the Medici! - and I would like to know if in these speeches they are describing factionalism the same way as the preachers do or if they think about it in a totally different way. But that’s a project for further down the line.
Looking back on my time researching, what struck me most is how much support I received from other scholars. I found people in the field to be enormously generous and helpful. I am continually both pleased and slightly embarrassed by how excited people are about my project, both abroad and here in the U.S. It is nice to experience that enthusiasm from other scholars and to recognize how much other people care about history.