FLAGELLATION, FLAGELLANTS.
I. Flagellation.
Corporal Punishment as a Penalty of the Church (§ 1). Self-scourging or Flagellation (§ 2). II. Flagellants.
The Flagellants of 1260. Venturinus of Bergamo,
1334 (§ 1). The Flagellants of 1348-49 (§ 2). The Albati or Bianchi of 1399 (§ 3). Flagellants in Thuringia about 1360. Konrad Schmid
(§4). Later Italian Brotherhoods (§ 5). Later Manifestations and Developments (§ 6).
I. Flagellation: Corporal chastisement as an ecclesiastical corrective penalty for clerics appears in the Western Church as early as the fifth century transferred from the Roman penal law, 1. Corporal but resorted to only in rare instances. Punish- From the Merovingian times onward, ment as a it became more widely diffused, and so Penalty of late as the seventeenth century was the Church, appointed as a punishment in cases of blasphemy, simony, concubinage, and other offenses committed by the clergy. In corrective establishments of the Church, corporal chastisement has continued in practise against clerical delinquents confined in the same, down to the present time. Flagellation as a monastic punishment for misdeeds of monks dates back to the earliest period of monasticism, and the rule of Benedict of Nursia makes extensive use of corporal chastisement. The congregations which had their origin in the Benedictine Order, as well as the other monastic orders, sisterhoods, and knightly orders founded in the twelfth century and later, adopted flagellation; but various orders which arose after the Council of Trent did not include this penalty in their rules. For certain offenses of laymen, too (desecration of Sunday, fortune-telling, etc.), the Church from the sixth century prescribed corporal chastisement as the penalty, and flogging in particular was threatened against such offenses until the eighteenth century. Lastly, the Inquisition applied flogging and flagellation as one of the lightest penalties in case of the voluntary recantation of heresy. In penitential discipline, corporal chastisement and particularly flagellation came to
Flagellation
THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
have a rapidly increasing importance after the beginning of the tenth century. Corporal chastisements in this connection are first mentioned (evidently as something newly in vogue) in the collection of canons of Regino of Prum (c. 960); they appear as a substitute for public penance, and at first were doubtless always executed by some outside hand, mostly by the priest. The sermons of the well-known crusade-preacher Fulco of Neuilly (q.v.) so intensified ascetic zeal in Paris about 1195 that great throngs of the penitent submitted their bared bodies to Fulco's chastising.
The beginnings of ascetic self-scourging, or flagellation proper, are still obscure. It is supposed to have originated about 1000 among certain Italian hermits, whose glowing penitential fervor became heightened into visionary and ecstatic enthusiasm, and started a religious movement which spread throughout all Italy. The hermit 2. Self- Marinus, who lived on an island of the Scourging Po, and his pupil Romuald (d. 1027), or Flagel- as well as the latter's disciples on lation. Monte Sitrio, mutually chastised one another with rods and lashes. Flagellation at their own hands was a customary practise, in the first half of the eleventh century, among the monks of Fontavellana (near Faenza) in Umbria, a foundation of the miracle-working hermit and penitential preacher Dominic of Foligno (d. 1031); likewise among the hermits of Luceoli in Umbria, who styled themselves disciples of St. Romuald. In both places the monk Dominicus Loricatus (d. 1060) distinguished himself by his severe self-castigatrohs, and they found an enthusiastic admirer and imitator in Peter Damian (q.v.), who entered the cloister of Fontavellana about 1035. To the far-reaching influence of Peter Damian, who also became prominent as the literary apologist of flagellation, its rapid extension then and afterward is preeminently due.
The monastic reform movement which emanated from Cluny with the more acute sense of sin awakened by Bernard of Clairvaux, and especially the ascetic enthusiasm propagated among the people by the mendicant orders and their preaching of Christ's Passion speedily made flagellation a most widely extended and impressive means of penance and expiation. Many of the monastic orders and sisterhoods adopted the provision of systematic self-castigation, or flagellation, in their rules. No doubt, mainly through the influence of the two great mendicant orders, this ascetic practise was then further popularized in the ranks of the laity. With most of the stricter orders (among others the Trappists, Carthusians, Priests of the Oratory, Fathers of Christian Doctrine, Discalced Carmelites, Capuchins, Redemptorists, Brothers of Charity), flagellation has continued in practise down to this day. It is exercised for the most part as a devotional act, usually once or several times in the week, according to a definitely prescribed ritual. The opposition to the practise incited by the monastic reformer Jan Busch (q.v.) is an incident without parallel.
II. Flagellants: The great flagellant pilgrimage of the year 1260 was the first of its kind. A sig-
nificant prelude thereto was the powerful religious movement called forth in Italy in 1223 by the preaching of repentance and pardon by a number of mendicant monks, particularly i. The the Dominican Giovanni da Vicenza. Flagellants Deeper causes of both movements were of 1260. the religious excitement and peni- Venturinus tential disposition of the populace of Bergamo, consequent upon the phenomenal 1334. activity of St. Francis; the extreme tension of feeling because of the passionate conflicts between papacy and empire- and the general disorder and ruin induced by these factional contests. The situation, again, was aggravated in 1259 by the outbreak of a violent epidemic; and above all by the expectation that was widely propagated by the adherents to the teaching of Joachim of Fiore (q.v.), that in the year 1260 there would occur a general revolution of things, especially a purification and renovation of the Church. The direct occasion for the flagellant crusades of that year was furnished by the advent of the venerable hermit Raniero Fasani, who as early as 1258 is alleged to have founded the first flagellant fraternity in Perugia, proclaiming that an impending visitation of judgment had been revealed to him. In the autumn of 1260 the movement overflowed all of Central and Upper Italy, still in the same year crossed the Alps and spread itself over Upper Germany and the neighboring Slavic domains. In Germany, however, both spiritual and temporal powers, as they perceived in the movement elements hostile to ecclesiastical and civil order, very decidedly opposed it as early as 1261 ; and with the exception of Southern France, public flagellations and flagellant crusades north of the Alps in the period between 1261 and 1349 manifested themselves only in quite isolated instances. In Upper Italy, however, the penitential sermons of the Dominican Venturinus of Bergamo gave occasion, in 1334, to an extensive new flagellant movement which came to a standstill in the very next year.
The great flagellant movement of the years 1348- 1349 is very closely connected with the apparition of the terrible pestilence known as the black death. Originating in the East, by 1347 the 2. The plague had found entrance into Dal- Flagellants matia, Upper Italy, and Southern of 1348-49. France, and from these three centers of contagion it spread toward Central Europe in 1348. Probably attempts to avert the threatening disaster by organizing flagellant processions were first made in Italy. From Upper Italy the movement then took its course, as precursor of the plague, by way of Hungary into Germany, then into Holland, Bohemia, Poland, Denmark, and even England, and reached its climax in the summer of 1349. The populace was already highly stirred up by apocalyptic expectations, and the plague was regarded as the premonitory sign of the great revolution of all things. Flagellation seemed the fitting preparation for the coming kingdom of God, and a substitute for the clergy, grown faithless to their charge. An apocryphal letter of Christ, originating in a much earlier age,