There is no proper history of the Italian eremitic movement. While there exists an appreciable literature about the ‘regular hermits’ – those who belonged to an exempt monastic order or to a specific congregation – we know virtually nothing about other religious hermits: those who were professed but who promised obedience to a bishop. In Italy we have only recently begun to study these ‘secular’ hermits, that is, those without links to any officially recognized religious institutions but who, whether laymen or laywomen, professed simple vows in private. And yet this was a form of religious life that was widespread throughout Europe during the early Middle Ages, as this current volume attests, and that reached its peak with Vatican II, with the acknowledgement of so-called ‘consecrated laywomen’.

These secular hermits can be divided into cenobiti, who live together; anacoreti, who live alone but are tied to a hermitage; girovaghi, who refuse the vow of ‘stability’ and who move freely from one hermitage to another; rurali or dei boschi, who live in the open countryside, in caves or in hovels, often close to a wood; urbani, living in their own houses or in ruined buildings – for the most part keepers, with sacral duties, of the walls, towers, bridges, wells, town-boundaries – and also the hermits, male and female, who look after an oratory, usually a shrine, that is, a lieu de mémoire, a place of individual or collective pilgrimage.

From the Middle Ages to today, diocesan synods in central Italy openly hint at the Church's persistent attempts to take precautions against the secular hermits, requiring them to promise obedience to the diocesan Ordinary, to make vows of poverty and chastity and to follow one of the approved rules. But despite the various efforts to regulate this movement, some canonists maintained that hermits were not obliged to profess religious vows according to a particular rule. Typical here is the Consilium given by the canonist Egidio Ghiselini who, in the mid fifteenth century, in answer to the question of whether sanctity could be better achieved by living as a Franciscan tertiary or as a hermit, and which of these two forms of living was the more perfect, replied that what mattered was not subscribing to either the one or the other form of living but rather how one lived one's life.