ABSTRACT
Peter Damian was a leading reformer in 11th-century Italy. He studied at Faenza and Parma, and pursued a career as a rhetorician at Ravenna before joining a hermitage at Fonte Avellana around 1035 or 1038 and was elected prior in 1043. His was an itinerant life of preaching a moral renovatio and of founding monastic communities. Damian’s extensive extant writings include 180 letters, 76 sermons, liturgical and devotional pieces, as well as legal briefs. These include his Life of St. Romuald, the Book of Gomorrah (on clerical sexual misconduct), and the Liber gratissimus. As an itinerant monastic reformer, Damian largely saw reform as the moral reform of the person and, in turn, of the Christian community, and his language often points towards to the example of the primitive Church and the eschatological fulfilment of the ideal Church. Reform implied a monastic life (and the foundation or expansion of monasteries) or taking on monastic practices (such as celibacy by the secular clergy). Peter Damian combined moral reform with an early awareness of the power of canon law to promote these ideals as norms. Damian died in 1072 the monastery of Santa Maria foris Portam in Faenza.
