This essay focusses on urban ideology considered from the point of view of theology. By the fifteenth century Florence was famous for its entrepreneurial and commercial activity, along with its generally thriving economy, urban development, language, political culture and advanced judicial system. 1 Yet Florence, as with other later medieval or renaissance cities, was not ‘proto-modern’: its culture ‘was not as yet divested of an inherent theological grounding’. 2 My particular argument is that the theology which informed the urban landscape was a ‘public theology’, tailored to and negotiated within the changing circumstances of a local context. The pulpit was the focus of the interactions which created and recreated the discourses which comprised the cultural capital (to adopt Bourdieu’s phrase) of the city. 3 It was this local theology thus generated which located and framed Florentine identities. While the study of preaching is now recognized as ‘a deepening and broadening field’, this essay nonetheless takes up sermons, and the theory underpinning them, as a still under-utilized textual tradition emerging from Florence’s urban context with a view to exploring aspects of the new understandings that preaching might shed on ‘urbanity’in a much studied city. 4 Although my case study is confined to fifteenth-century Florence, it