Visite pastorali in terra di mezzadria: il clero e le popolazioni contadine nella Toscana d’inizio ‘900

Abstract

Pastoral visits are an irreplaceable source to study the people's religious sentiment in the beginning of the 20th century. These are a widespread Post-Tridentine pastoral practice and one of the main duties of bishops. Therefore, documents recorded from the visits to the rural Tuscany allow us to research some aspects of peasant communities: the role of parish priests in a sharecropping system, the rites of communities, superstitions, cult traditions which were visibly demonstrated in sacrament practices and the devotion to certain saints, as well as in religious feasts closely related to the harvest cycles. Finally, this paper casts a gaze at the moral conditions and social transformation of the parish churches visited, urban development processes, blasphemy and at the dissemination of socialist ideas. To prepare this article, many unpublished documents kept in the historic records of the dioceses of Florence, Fiesole, Sansepolcro, Pistoia, Prato and Pescia have been consulted.