FLAGELLANTI
The Rule of St Benedict contemplates the case of having to resort to flogging to punish rebellious and guilty monks (Reg., chaps. 2, 28, 30). Among the ascetic practices of mortification, voluntary flagellation was also fully adopted as a penance for one’s own sins. In the 11th century, St Peter Damian and St Dominic Loricato, his disciple, defended this custom in monasteries and became its promoters.
Following the example of monks, laypeople also embraced this practice, especially during public calamities, to avert divine wrath. Collective public manifestations of such penance, however, are first recorded only in the 13th century, particularly when in 1260 the hermit Ranieri Fasani began calling the citizens of Perugia to penance. Dressed in sackcloth, girded with a rope, and holding a discipline of leather straps, through preaching and example he moved the people to public self-flagellation, forming a large Company known as the Disciplined of Christ. This quickly spread from the city into the countryside and surrounding regions.
In October, processions of disciplinants led by Fasani met at Imola; from there the movement extended to Bologna, in November to Modena, Reggio, Parma, Piacenza, Tortona, and descended to Genoa. On 30 November, Asquino, dean of Aquileia, arrived in Cividale in Friuli with naked penitents who flagellated themselves, and within twenty days they had multiplied throughout Friuli. While the men performed this in public by day, the women did likewise at night in their homes or gathered at dusk in churches. The movement, passing through France and Austria, reached Germany and even Poland; it recurred several times in that century, everywhere bringing about improvements in morals, reconciliation of hearts, return of exiles, and restitution of stolen goods. The lasting consequence that followed was the foundation in many regions of Italy of numerous confraternities known under the names of Flagellants, Battuti, Disciplinati, Frustati, whose members, mostly laypeople, gathered to practice discipline according to their particular statutes in their churches or chapels, to sing their lauds, and to attend well-defined exercises of piety and works of charity: almsgiving for the poor, with special regard to pilgrims, periodic visits to the sick and imprisoned, escorting and praying for the dead; and in these offices they were to expend the legacies and revenues of property entrusted to them by the piety of the faithful and especially of the brethren. It can well be asserted that in this respect such confraternities were an important channel of charity in the 13th–15th centuries. Of special importance were the hospitals founded and run by them in Italian cities; some of these still exist and bear disciplines in their coats of arms. In Rome there arose in 1267 the confraternity later called that of the Gonfalone, which had affiliated confraternities of the same name in various parts of Italy, even far distant. No less celebrated than the foregoing was the Company of the Disciplinants of the Most Holy Saviour, erected near the Lateran, which likewise became an archconfraternity and in Rome took charge of several hospitals later united at the Lateran itself.
At Siena, the celebrated Hospital of Santa Maria della Scala was entrusted to the care of the Disciplinants. Often these companies were under the protection and guidance of the major mendicant Orders, a fact that probably helped keep them free from heretical influences. Indeed, while at their outset they may have been influenced by Gioachimite elements, and while some manifestations of fanaticism (which ought not to be judged by modern standards) are found especially at the beginning, all this must be carefully distinguished from what was noted abroad and moved Clement VI on 20 October 1349 (on the morrow of the great pestilence) to condemn the Flagellants. Movements analogous to that of 1260 occurred in 1334 through the work of Bl. Venturino of Bergamo (q.v.), who journeyed from northern Italy as far as Rome, and again in 1390 through the work of the Bianchi (q.v.), whose beneficent activity is linked to that of the preceding age, expanding and reviving it in many places. In northern Europe the movement was renewed in the following age, not without heretical admixtures.
FOLKLORE
In the popular tradition of some regions of Italy, especially in the south such as Calabria and Sicily, there survive in certain localities the ancient companies of the Battenti (in the local dialect called Vattenti), or at least there remains the custom among the most fervent faithful of beating themselves with whips (disciplines), canes, or other similar instruments of torment. The practice is especially connected with the processions of Holy Week, during which the “Vattenti” proceed dressed in the special white sackcloth that has openings at the shoulders or back.