The Arca di Sant'Agostino and the Hermits of St. Augustine in Fourteenth-Century Pavia

In 1327 Pope John XXII granted the Hermits of St. Augustine joint possession of San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro in Pavia, a church that until then had been for a century in the sole charge of the Canons Regular of St. Augustine.
Both orders claimed a founding by St. Augustine himself, whose relics were somewhere in the church - although their precise location was unknown. The unprecedented division of the church and the ensuing conflict between the Hermits and the Canons were embedded in the larger struggle between the forces of universal church and regional state that engulfed the city of Pavia and ultimately much of Italy in the fourteenth century. Both city and church were contested repeatedly among the papacy, the empire, and the Visconti.
This book is a study of the political negotiation between the papacy and the Visconti conducted by the Hermits at San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro in the Trecento - and a related examination of the Arca di Sant'Agostino, the patronage and iconography of which were deeply enmeshed in that larger historical context. This volume argues that the Arca's iconography embraces three seemingly disparate agendas: the Hermits' own claims to St. Augustine, the celebration of Visconti authority in Lombardy, and the promotion of papal temporal power.