While we have been dissuaded from judging books by their covers, volume 24 of The Medieval Franciscans series from Brill should be an exception because the cover art—a sixteenth-century leaf with detailed woodcut image—combined with Brill’s bold colors provides an aesthetic entryway to an edited volume of equally meticulous scholarship. While Friar Roberto Caracciolo da Lecce (1425-1495) may not be well known today, even among medieval scholars, this volume, expertly edited by Giacomo Mariani and Steven J. McMichael, argues convincingly that he should be, and it provides the essential scholarship necessary to correct this error and provide a scholarly foundation on which to build continuing research on this remarkable and influential figure.
The ten chapters, by nine authors, comprise an international and diverse group of scholars representing six countries (United States, Japan, Italy, Canada, Hungary, and Croatia); early career and established scholars, who teach at various educational levels; the disciplines of history, linguistics, literary studies, and theology; and also a welcome balance of gender representation. Overall, the chapters are mostly well-balanced in length, substantive content, and thorough documentation (thankfully in the form of footnotes). They are preceded by a short but useful introduction (1-6) and followed by a comprehensive bibliography (215-221)—divided into primary and secondary sources—but a minimal index (222-223). The book is divided into three main parts: 1 Context of Late Medieval Preaching, 2. Sermons, and 3. the Re-Use of Sermon Collections. Eight of the ten chapters contain new, unpublished research.
The editors introduce Roberto Caracciolo by assuming little knowledge of the Franciscan preacher on the part of the reader. Given the paucity of published scholarship on Roberto since a 1947 monograph, this volume fills a gap in research and complements Mariani’s own recent biographical monograph (Brill, 2022). The scholarly interlude is not reflective, however, of any lack of source material. The recent revival of Roberto studies, including this 2025 volume, demonstrates the scope of documentation for Roberto’s numerous sermon collections, “unmatched by the production of any other preacher of his time” (2).
The Introduction also provides a biographical sketch of Roberto’s life and work, including his professions in the Conventual and the Observant Franciscan orders, conflict within the Observant Order, the remarkable demand for his preaching, and the pinnacle of his career as Bishop of Aquino, briefly Bishop of Lecce, and close collaborator with the Franciscan Pope Sixtus IV. Demand for his sermons was satisfied only through the new technology of the printing press from the 1470s on. Roberto’s preaching and publications resulted in seven major edited collections of his sermons (five Latin and two Italian) that were printed in hundreds of editions and circulated throughout Europe.
Chapter 1, by Carolyn Muessig, focuses on Roberto’s sermons on the stigmata of St. Francis of Assisi. She provides background to Roberto with a thorough analysis of these sermons in the context of sermones de sanctis. Muessig argues that Roberto lays out the process of the miracle of stigmatization while drawing on authorities such as Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas in preaching the validity of stigmata and its miraculous nature, all in service of strengthening the faith.
McMichael’s Chapter 2 compares Mary Magdalene in Roberto’s sermons with the sermons of Bernardino of Siena, the older contemporary Franciscan preacher, as well as their common source material from the Franciscan Vita Christi, itself based on the Golden Legend. The comparison is especially apt since, as McMichael explains, Roberto was compared to Bernardino in his own day. He concludes that both preachers reiterated and affirmed the depiction of Mary Magdalene found not only in the Vita Christi but also as she is pictured in fresco cycles. She is conveyed here as a multi-dimensional figure whose biblical narrative—through the lens of medieval interpretation from Pope Gregory I to the fifteenth-century Franciscan preachers—embodies the Triple Way mysticism: purgation, illumination, and union.
In Chapter 3, Giacomo Mariani addresses the question of absolution in the sacrament of confession and Roberto’s criticism of the Franciscan Niccolò da Osimo, perhaps made more acute since it took place following Roberto’s leave of the Observant Order in 1452. Mariani examines a passage in Roberto’s Tractatus de divina caritate where the preacher accused Niccolò of supporting an heretical doctrine regarding the impossibility of reiterating penance, specifically, that a believer’s relapse into sin after confession would invalidate the original penance. This position, which had roots in early Christianity but was largely abandoned by the fourth century, resurfaced in Niccolò’s Quadriga spirituale, a widely circulated vernacular work on religious instruction. Mariani demonstrates that, while this doctrine appears only as ahapax in Niccolò’s writings, Roberto’s attack reveals both theological disagreement and personal resentment against his former Observant confreres. Interestingly, Roberto’s criticism of Niccolò and the Observants was progressively softened and eventually eliminated entirely from later printed editions of his sermons, showing how fifteenth-century printers could exercise editorial control over textual content.
Chapter 4, by Salvatore Leaci, investigates “social control strategies” (65) among the fifteenth-century Franciscans through their preaching, and argues that homiletical techniques employed to make preaching more effective “responded to a plan of religious, moral, and social disciplining of the whole society” in coordination with political authorities with the same social objectives (65). These strategies fit within four major areas: supporting of public authorities’ image and role; fueling political propaganda; forming political and social idioms to facilitate social intervention; and defining behavior to shape the civis fideles. He concludes that these strategies aimed to eliminate divisions and dissent among the people who functioned as subjects, citizens, and devotees in a city.
Part 2 begins with Lyn A. Blanchfield’s chapter on Roberto’s “semi-dramatic” preaching as illustrated by his theatrical 1448 Good Friday sermon in Perugia that was preached in conjunction with the Passion play and orchestrated to elicit tears of compunction from the audience members. To aid her study, Blanchfield draws from vivid accounts of this event in the Chronicle of the City of Perugia. It seems this combination of homily and drama was so effective that it prompted Roberto to repeat this ritualized performance on several subsequent Good Friday holidays. Blanchfield concludes that the powerfully engaging performance and experience at Perugia had lasting positive effects on Roberto’s growing reputation and popularity as a career preacher.
Chapter 6 is Salvatore Leaci’s second contribution to the book and provides an historical overview to the fifteenth-century Ottoman conflict with Christendom as the context for understanding Roberto’s anti-Turkish and anti-Islam presentation of the Ottomans in his sermons. Recognizing a corpus of common medieval texts and arguments against Islam and the Ottomans utilized by Roberto and other contemporary preachers, Leaci analyzes the text of a half dozen of Roberto’s sermons. For example, Roberto, having access to a version of Muhammad’s isra (Night Journey), addresses Islam directly and attacks the authority of Muhammad as a prophet while using standard Christian Islamophobic (my word) rhetoric. Leaci concludes that Roberto, along with other Franciscan preachers at the time, were instrumental in the anti-Turk, pro-Crusade propaganda of the fifteenth century.
In Chapter 7, operating from a linguistic perspective, Marco Maggiore provides a detailed analysis of the spoken Italian Roberto used in his preached sermons. Focusing primarily on the Quaresimale volgare (1474) and Specchio della fede (1495), Maggiore addresses the challenge of reconstructing Roberto’s vernacular speech from texts that have been filtered through transcribers and printers. He demonstrates that the Quaresimale contains strong Venetian dialectal features—including phonological, morphological, and lexical traits—that likely derive from a Venetian reportator who transcribed Roberto’s sermons rather than from the preacher himself. In contrast, the Specchio, written as a theological treatise, contains a more neutral language with discernible Southern Italian elements that provide evidence of Roberto’s maternal dialect. Maggiore concludes that, while Roberto avoided most dialectal features in public preaching, evidence of his Leccese origins remains identifiable in his written vernacular works, and this offers valuable insights into the relationship between oral performance and written transmission in late medieval preaching.
Part 3 begins with Andrea Radošević’s chapter on Roberto’s sermon collection, Quaresimale volgare, and the Croatian translation, Korizmenjak, printed in 1508 in Senji, Croatia. This text is significant for two reasons: it is the last book published at Senji, and it is the only known translation of these sermons into another vernacular language. Radošević investigates how the Croatian translator dealt with the performative Italian language features of Roberto’s preaching style. She concludes that the translator was keenly aware of these features and worked successfully to incorporate idiomatically equivalent procedures into the Croatian version, including verba dicendi instructions and Slavonic elements, to match the evocative and emphatic tone of Roberto’s sermons, with the result that the translation retains not only the content but also the homiletical techniques utilized by Roberto for emotionally engaging his audiences.
Cecilia Radò’s Chapter 9 focuses on the process of sermon writing and compilation based on sermon notes, the “Draft-sermons of Pécs,” found in an appendix of a Hungarian incunabulum edition of Roberto’s sermons called Quinquecclesiae. The draft-sermon notes are written in the same hand as the marginalia and precisely dated to 1495-1496 and located to Pécs, Hungary. The notes cover sermons for the religious holidays during this period from the Feast of Corpus Christi in 1495 to the Feast of St. Emeric in 1496. Radò concludes that this unique source provides insight into one Hungarian preacher’s methods of sermon writing, gathering of source material, brainstorming topics, and discerning intentions of the sermons. Beyond the particulars of the document, it also points to the larger role of sermon writing and preaching in Hungary and its connections to the larger European intellectual world beyond Pécs.
The final chapter, by Yoko Kimura, gives an overview of Roberto’s sermons in late medieval manuscripts, which is especially useful given how much the previous chapters focus on the early printed collections of sermons. Kimura points out that the advent of printing did not end the tradition of sermon manuscripts, and in fact, “it was not at all rare” for printed sermons to be hand copied (196). Her study examines two manuscripts: Frankfurt, Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek, ms. lat. oct. 117 from northern Italy (c. 1465-1475) and Innsbruck, Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Tirol, ms. 728 by the Canons Regular of Prémontré of Wilten in the early 1480s. These two manuscripts show how other preachers used Roberto’s sermons for their own homiletical settings and purposes. Kimura notes the significance of Roberto’s sermons being copied not only outside of Italy but even outside of the Franciscan orders during his own lifetime. Her study concludes that the circulation of these sermons in manuscript form demonstrates that Roberto’s colloquial style and voice were carefully selected and arranged by the copyists to use and reuse for their own preaching. These examples put Roberto and his sermons into the wider context of exchange, intellectual and material, between the Italian and German worlds of the late fifteenth century.
While the editors have produced a smooth, cohesive volume, there are just a few places where the English of some contributors, for whom it is a second (or third, or fourth) language, is not entirely idiomatic for an English-language readership (e.g., “Northern Eastern” for “Northeastern” and “latest” for “last” [both 154]). Still, the meaning and writing style remain clear throughout the volume. This book on Roberto Caracciolo da Lecce certainly delivers on its promise to provide new scholarship that remedies a deficiency in research, complements existing publications, and ultimately provides much-needed depth and breadth of knowledge and analysis of a significant figure for an academic audience in addition to providing a new, substantive contribution to late medieval sermon studies.