POINTS OF DEPARTURE

Two weighty works are essential in the hand baggage of any student of the early Humiliati. The first, and still irreplaceable, is the three-volume Vetera Humiliatorum Monumenta, published in the 1760s by a young Jesuit scholar, Girolamo Tiraboschi (1731–94), better known to posterity as the author of a monumental history of Italian literature. Tiraboschi taught rhetoric at the Brera Academy in Milan, which had acquired the site, name and archives of a prominent house of the Humiliati. This gave him easy access to a mass of documentation, including the Bullarium Humiliatorum, a substantial collection of papal letters and privileges addressed to the order. Many of these he published in the Monumenta, together with material unearthed in other archives in Milan and through correspondence with archivists and scholars all over northern Italy in a manner reminiscent of the working practices of the Bollandists and Maurists. The resulting volumes include an extensive collection of documentation concerning the history of the order down to the sixteenth century, to which Tiraboschi added a careful critique in the form of seven lengthy dissertations.

The second study, and one cast in a very different style, is a volume published in 1911 by Luigi Zanoni: Gli umiliati nei loro rapporti con l'eresia, l'industria della lana ed i comuni nei secoli xii e xiii sulla scorta di documenti inediti.