With this book, Alexandra Lee provides us with the first monograph on the Bianchi since Daniel Bornstein's The Bianchi of 1399: popular devotion in late medieval Italy (1993). In the intervening years, Lee points out, there have been pertinent new discoveries of Bianchi-related art and devotional objects, as well as a multi-faceted resurgence of interest on both ecclesiastical and secular fronts. Key aspects of late medieval Italian historiography have also evolved considerably, perhaps most importantly thinking about the relationship between religion and urban life. The topic of the Bianchi is, thus, ripe for reconsideration and Lee's book offers real utility to readers by taking all this new evidence into account and analysing recent claims about it critically. But it does so in a deliberately limited way, focused primarily on the cities with the richest chronicle accounts: especially those of Lucca's Giovanni Sercambi and Pistoia's Luca Dominici. Taking these as case studies, Lee's emphasis is on the importance of local political and religious differences, and the diverse ways the Bianchi movement was shaped by those differences as it spread.

Lee's book has two primary parts. The first, comprising chapters ii–v, considers the various Bianchi origin stories and the miraculous visions that enabled the continuation and spread of the initial movement, along with the few consistent regulations (as Lee terms them) the Bianchi followed and the practices associated with them, including the singing of laude, public prayer and self-flagellation. The practices most appropriately associated with the Bianchi – peacemaking, intra-urban procession and regional pilgrimage – are then considered in chapters vi and vii.

On the whole, Lee's sense of the Bianchi frequently echoes that of Bornstein. The two agree on a great deal, for example the lack of any consistent leadership, the importance of both urban and rural aspects of the movement, and the limited importance of self-flagellation (here Lee makes the interesting suggestion that what flagellation there was may have been gestural or symbolic rather than full-fledged). And both agree that the movement produced little innovation and had little long-term influence. Instead, the Bianchi tended to be guided by existing local religious practices and their memory was then appropriated by local actors. Given her considerable agreement with Bornstein, Lee's distinct voice is clearest when it comes to her chosen analytical habits and categories.

In keeping with her emphasis on local difference, Lee presents the lack of Bianchi innovation as a marker of the strength of local religious practices particular to each town. This differs somewhat from Bornstein's suggestion that the absence of much innovation by the Bianchi, and the ease with which they were embraced by the Church, was evidence of a common world of popular orthodoxy, an array of religious practices and ideas that met personal and collective needs and mapped with relative ease onto the doctrinal requirements of the Church. One gets the sense that where Bornstein was perhaps more of a lumper, Lee is a splitter.

Both share an interest in religion as a social phenomenon and talk about popular religion in ways that rightly deemphasise divisions between the laity and the clergy. Bornstein's work on the Bianchi, and elsewhere, has focused especially on parish priests and their relationship to lay society. Lee's formulation of popular religion as a phenomenon that pushes against strict lay-clerical distinctions, however, differs somewhat. In key moments, as I will describe shortly, Lee goes so far in resisting the distinction that any line between ecclesiastical and secular actors and their interests largely disappears. Furthermore, she is not much focused on parish priests. Instead, her clergymen most often appear in the general guise of ‘ecclesiastical authorities’, usually meaning bishops, and one gets the sense that Lee sees their main role to have been managing potent lay enthusiasm (though she rejects this term), guiding it down familiar paths, and mitigating any potential risks associated with it. Given all this, Lee's sense of the place of the clergy feels surprisingly top-down, given her emphasis on popular religion, and there is less sense than one might expect of a productive, dialectical relationship between lay religiosity and a diverse clerical world.

Along with popular religion, Lee's other major framing idea is the well-known category of civic religion. Given Lee's focus on Pistoia as one of her main case studies, and the role of the idea of civic religion in David Herlihy's 1967 study of that city, reflection on it is understandable, and Lee's claims are often in step with recent work. Earlier work on civic religion tended to read it as the leveraging of the holy by secular actors for political purposes. In more recent years, the fact that the holy and the political were essentially inseparable has instead been emphasised. Building on Augustine Thompson's fundamental study of religion in the communes, scholars increasingly emphasise ways the two are interwoven in the public acts of urban governments, the religious rhythms of urban daily life and even the fundamental social and political values of urban denizens. Lee takes up civic religion in chapter vi, which examines the role of confraternities, the details of intra-urban processions and preaching; and chapter vii, focused on issues of leadership, the logistics of inter-urban pilgrimage, peacemaking and the limited opening of prisons. She concludes that civic religion remains a useful way of thinking about all these matters, and especially about leadership, but the details of why deserve note.

Lee consistently notes that the absence of a charismatic leader of the Bianchi movement meant that local authorities tended to step into the void. Readers may wonder, at times, whether instances Lee flags as examples of local leadership, and the kind of leadership associated with a ideal charismatic leader type, are truly comparable. Local authorities regularly appear at the head of intra-urban processions, quite literally getting out ahead of a possible problem. But this admittedly visible act does not seem like a particularly substantial one. Beyond this, furthermore, Lee prefers to lump, here, rather than split, considering the leadership that interests her in two categories that are both termed civic leadership. Specifically, we see ecclesiastical intervention in the more public aspects of the movement (especially said processions) and the handling of infrastructural or logistical matters, often behind the scenes, by secular authorities. Bishops might preach or lead processions, while civic officials might provide notaries for peacemaking or foodstuffs for pilgrims. Ultimately, Lee considers all such instances of leadership, ecclesiastical and secular, as examples of civic religion. She emphasises that this is true even of ecclesiastics operating in explicitly ecclesiastical roles because ‘their activities were inherently bound to communal operations, and their actions were often inseparable or indistinguishable from those by secular groups’ (p. 213). Many readers may be sympathetic to this idea; others might feel that it takes us too far afield of the original meaning of ‘civic religion’ to be an argument for its utility.

This sense of ecclesiastical and secular elites as a single group of civic leaders leads to the perhaps unintended sense that powerful figures like bishops can stand for the clergy as a category, so that their overtly managerial role crowds out any potential consideration of the place of lower clergymen. An exception to this might be Lee's discussion of preaching, for here we are told that ‘bishops could not keep up’ with demand ‘and local parish priests were not equipped’ to deliver the kinds of sermons needed. Most preaching, Lee suggests, must have been performed by those with the necessary experience, with the implication seemingly being that this means mendicants (pp. 174–5). Yet, Lee tells us that Dominici's chronicle describes Pistoia's Bishop Andrea Franchi as the main preacher there (albeit also a Dominican), and that Francesco Datini's account says the same of the bishop of Fiesole (p. 177). Lee certainly knows the parish clergy were present, but their relationship to the Bianchi has largely been sidelined by better-evidenced episcopal action.

Ultimately, one gets that sense that Lee would agree with Bornstein that the Bianchi movement provides us an important opportunity for thinking about the robust lived Christianity specific to late medieval Italy. And one can accept her argument that local constellations of the political and the religious were variable in their details and their impact on the Bianchi, even if one might just as likely be struck, as this reader was, by the considerable similarities between localities. Ultimately, Lee's work resonates not only with that of Bornstein and Thompson but also with excellent recent work by scholars like Roisin Cossar and Mary Harvey Doyno. But it is also true, I think, that an opportunity was missed here to engage more robustly with how the relationship between popular piety, ecclesiastical structures and urban governments and societies really worked at the turn of the fifteenth century, an era when, after all, the word ‘commune’ was increasingly quaint, and the world described by Thompson ever more distant.