Competing Saints in late medieval Padua

This article addresses the question of the evolution of civic ritual in late medieval Europe between the early thirteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Arguing for the importance of the participants as well as the planners of civic ritual, and for the need to contextualize the forms of ritual behaviour, it also offers a new case study: the changing civic calendar and the celebration of feast days in the northern Italian city of Padua. It publishes for the first time documentary evidence for the patronage and iconography of saints’ days in Padua, drawing heavily on the city’s statutes, and aims to interpret what it was that religious and civic officials – as well as Padua’s citizens and inhabitants – intended and experienced. It not only throws light on the reverence for universal and local saints in the Paduan Christian calendar, but also focuses on the festivals, holidays, fairs, parish life and churches of late medieval Padua and its contado