The Sons of St Augustine

The Order of the Hermits of St Augustine have long been sidelined as pale imitators of the Franciscans. Seeking to correct this, this book provides a fundamental cross-disciplinary re-evaluation of their lives, ideas, and impacts. By challenging the scholarly focus on the urban sphere in communal Italy, it explores the rapid emergence of Augustinian convents as lively religious and artistic centres on the margins of cities and in the Italian countryside. Moreover, it demonstrates for the first time the existence of common intellectual themes which linked together dispersed Augustinian communities. Fired by contemporary debates about the antiquity of the Order, the Augustinian friars forged a fictive past in which they linked their origins to St Augustine and late antique hermits. The book argues that saints, objects, and the natural environment all played a vital part in brokering this. This is underpinned by tracing the 'things' the Hermits commissioned, inherited, and accumulated to become the 'heirs of St Augustine'. Crucially, this book explores how this forged antiquity was promoted not only through human agencies, such as the creation of eremitical saints' cults, but also through the strategic use of the liminal position of their convents, re-inventing the Augustinian hermitages as places of power on the margins of the human sphere and the untamed natural environment. At stake here is the extent of religious patronage in the rural landscape and the re-evaluation of the long-standing tension between city and countryside in the medieval imaginary. Ultimately, this book not only challenges the prevailing understanding of the mendicant movement as a quintessentially urban phenomenon, but sheds new light on broader processes of late medieval societies in forging fictive narratives of power, prestige, and antiquity.