International Medieval Society, Paris
Société Internationale des Médiévistes, Paris

Symposium 2006 Abstracts

“The Care of French Pilgrims in Schism and Post-Schism Rome”
Katharine Brophy Dubois

In the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries a new institutional form for charity developed in Rome: the national pilgrim hospice. Hospices founded by foreigners during this period integrated strangers into Rome’s peculiarly alien urban environment even as these pilgrims sought spiritual aid at the shrines of the church’s most universal saints. Although French pilgrims traveled to Rome during the Great Schism, especially in Jubilee years, and certainly just after reunification, the historical record is sparse concerning a French national pilgrim hospice until the late fifteenth century. In this paper I argue that the multiple and sometimes conflicting characters of late-medieval Rome made it necessary for the French to establish an institutional presence in the city just as other foreign residents did in the years of the Schism, although they were not present as curials during this period. In the early fifteenth century, hospices for poor French-speaking pilgrims existed alongside hospices founded by English residents, Germans, Swedish, and several other foreign groups. Then, between 1417 and the end of the fifteenth century, French curials and representatives of the French state used the institutional form of the national pilgrim hospice principally for social and political purposes. As its own national character slowly coalesced, the French state appropriated hospices for pilgrims who spoke French or were part of the French kingdom in Rome, establishing a significant social presence in the capital of the papal state congruent with its political presence in the Curia. By the end of the fifteenth century, the French hospice of St. Louis was one of the largest, most impressive social institutions amongst foreign communities in the city, reflecting the desire of the French in Post-Schism Rome to be entirely integrated into the social and spiritual fabric of the city whilst maintaining a distinctly foreign character.