Note 59 — PERUGIA

It will not be forgotten by students of Italian history that Umbria was the cradle of the Battuti or Flagellants, who overspread Italy in the fourteenth century, and to whose devotion were due the Laude, or popular hymns of the religious confraternities, which in course of time produced the Sacre Rappresentazioni of fifteenth-century Florentine literature. Umbria, and especially Perugia and Assisi, seems to have been inventive in piety between 1200 and 1400.