The Language of Dives and Lazarus: Preaching Generosity and Almsgiving in Renaissance Florence

Abstract

THIS ESSAY CONCERNS THE MORALITY of wealth and the range of meanings it had for people in Florence during the fifteenth century. While there were contemporary humanist discussions and reassessments of the value of wealth, such as those of Poggio Bracciolini, I am concerned here with what Florentines were hearing from their pulpits. My focus is on sermon texts that fed discussion about the pros and cons of wealth and, with it, poverty. To borrow the words of a Dominican preacher from Santa Maria Novella: “Poverty comes with the rich man’s feasting. Through Lazarus he is challenged daily to acts of virtue.” These words assign agency to the poor. They served as a constant reminder of the rich man’s obligations. But the pithy sentences also ascribe the source of poverty to the activities of the rich man himself. The biblical parable of Dives and Lazarus—where Dives is consigned to hell and Lazarus is welcomed into the bosom of Abraham—articulated the anxiety that drove the moral discussions of the period: “Could a rich man enter the kingdom of heaven?” In our day, this question, thus posed, may seem prosaic tomany (although perennially pertinent in the context of the church’s relationship to poverty), but the issue at that time obsessed the wealthy in the context of the