A Layman's Life of St. Augustine in Late Medieval Italy: Patronage and Polemic

During the century before the Reformation, lay elites on the Italian peninsula composed a striking number of classicizing Latin texts about the saints. These narratives are little known, although some — for example, Leonardo Giustiniani's life of St. Nicholas, Francesco Diedo's vita of St. Roch, and Giovanni Calfurnio's passion of Simon of Trent — went into print early and have thus been more or less available for centuries. Others, such as Giovanni Carrara's life of Clare of Montefalco, have been recovered and edited only recently. Some remain unstudied, even unrecognized — among them Nicolaus Secundinus's translation of a Greek account of Gregory Nazianzus. Yet others depend on an uncertain manuscript tradition (such as George of Trebizond's passion of Andrew of Chios) or are lost entirely (e.g., Pier Candido Decembrio's life of Ambrose). I propose here that the authorial ambitions, the details of style and content, and the complications of context embodied in this minor literature make it very much worth knowing.