Preface

The title of this special issue invokes the concept of civitas, understood as the collective body of a town’s inhabitants bound together by a shared commitment to the common good. In contrast to the monastic orders, who typically lived apart from urban centers, the mendicant orders deliberately embedded themselves in the fabric of the city. Consequently, mendicant friars engaged in dynamic exchanges with the lay world, participated in humanist discourses revolving around the valori civici, and exerted both direct and indirect influence on conceptions of the "body of the city" – in its immaterial, imagined dimension as well as in its material, built form. Bringing together six case studies by scholars of art history, history, and the history of philosophy, this special issue explores how mendicant involvement shaped art, architecture, and urban space in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy.