There was a clear sense that the city as built environment embraced a wider ‘‘sacred landscape of the streets.’’ What seems clear is that medieval people often sought to take the heavenly Jerusalem as a model applicable to the material city. There were various attempts to make the concept of the divine city visible not merely in the structure of cathedrals and churches but even in the layout of cities. For example, the Statutes of Florence of 1339 spoke of the sacred number of twelve gates even though by that stage the city had extended to fifteen gates.
Italy also gave birth to the notion that civic life itself, an organized community of people living in concord, could be just as much a way to God as monasticism. The city was often seen as an ideal form of social life that was in effect an image in this world of the heavenly Jerusalem. There is a literary genre, laudes civitatis or poems, that articulated a utopian ideal of civic life. Like the glories of the heavenly city, the human city is depicted in the laudes as a place where diverse people are able to live together in peace. Cities were renowned for the quality of communal life in which every citizen or group found a particular place that contributed to building up the whole. Finally medieval cities were regularly praised as places of hard work. The point was that the city itself was idealized as a kind of metaphor for the City of God.
Streets in predominantly Catholic countries even today retain medieval examples of religious plaques and statues. For example, the rich collection of street shrines in the citta` vecchia of the Italian city of Bari, ranging in age from the twelfth century to the present, has been the subject of scholarly writing. The sense that the city as a whole was a sacred landscape was reinforced by processions and blessings. In medieval cities the Eucharist was a public drama, not only in the many churches but also the feast-day pageants, mystery plays, and street processions, for example on the feast of Corpus Christi. Processions, before Lent and on Rogation Days, or ceremonies to mark out the boundaries of each parish (known as ‘‘beating the bounds’’) together symbolized a purification of the city from the spirit of evil.
The Gregorian Reform
