Strangers and sojourners: Pilgrims, penance and urban geography in late-medieval Rome.

Abstract

Created in the year 1300, the Roman Jubilee was a celebration of penitential pilgrimage focused on Rome's principal churches. This dissertation is about the Jubilee's development and its proliferation from a once-a-century happening to an event that occurred every twenty-five years by 1450. The Jubilee's maturation was shaped by three major forces. The basis for the Jubilee was Rome's rich sacred topography, a landscape comprised of multiple shrines and relics laden with spiritual value. The contemporary state of penitential devotion invested pilgrimage with meaning that found unique expression in Rome, notably through the Jubilee's plenary indulgence. Finally, individual popes who sponsored Jubilees used the celebration in the service of their own needs. The development of the Jubilee as an institution with defined values, actors, and rituals paralleled that of a different kind of institution in Rome: foreign national hospices. In the second half of the fourteenth century charities for poor pilgrims took their place alongside Roman hospitals, but limited their services to those defined by language as co-nationals with the founders, many of who were not in any official capacity connected to the papal court or Curia. The emergence of a number of such hospices in one place was unprecedented. Many of the same forces that caused the Jubilee to develop throughout the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries into a mature institution-event---Rome's sacred topography, penitential rituals, and papal and curial politics---resulted in the creation of the foreign national hospices. The interrelated development of the late-medieval Jubilee and Rome's foreign national hospices reflect the unique urban environment of Rome in the later Middle Ages. This dissertation, then, is about the way Christians understood Rome in a conflictual era of plague, institutional division and societal fragmentation; the way pilgrims used Rome; and the way lasting and influential institutions were born of these meanings and uses.