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Confraternities (Renaissance and Reformation)

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  1. Introduction
  2.  
  3. Confraternities were the lay face of the Renaissance and early modern Catholic Church. Present in every city, village, and parish, these voluntary groups had millions of male and female members throughout the Catholic Church who gathered to achieve collectively a range of spiritual and social goals. For many laypeople these were the vehicles through which they engaged with the Catholic Church and acted out their faith, supplementing and sometimes replacing the local parish. As a result, the impact on the laity of devotional movements, doctrinal change, or ecclesiastical disputes cannot be understood apart from confraternities. Members could receive the key sacraments of confession, communion, and last rites and fulfill most ritual and charitable observances through their confraternity. The range of groups was such in most urban communities that members could choose between active or moderate devotional observances; tight or light discipline; varying degrees of cultural, educational, or charitable activity; and different levels of mutual assistance in sickness or death. Members joined groups for a diverse range of reasons: to access spiritual resources, to achieve social and political advantages, to secure mutual assistance, and to enjoy group sociability. As corporate bodies, confraternities gathered significant resources over time and took on a wide range of public activities within their communities. They were heavily involved in civic ritual life; were critical vehicles for the charitable distribution of food, medicine, alms, and dowries; and were organizers of major institutions for the needy and the sick. Much of their cultural patronage—of music, drama, painting, art, and architecture—had both a corporate and a public function. This made them key players in what might be termed local religion in rural areas and civic religion in towns and cities—that is, a religion fashioned out of collaboration between laity and clergy and directing spiritual resources to secular needs. While the potential for tension both with regular and secular clergy could be high, most local studies reveal significant lay initiative and frequent collaboration with clergy until at least the 16th century. At that point, ecclesiastical authorities aimed to expand control over confraternal activities and potential as a way of curbing what were seen as abuses, and of harnessing lay resources and energy for the expanded project of Catholic reform.
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  5. Primary Sources
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  7. Apart from statute collections such as Sánchez Herrero and Pérez González 2002 and Perani and Rivlin 2000 and matriculation lists such as Rollo-Koster 2009, the most commonly available primary sources produced by or for confraternities are dramatical and musical texts. Those in Meredith and Tailby 1983, Newbigin 1996, and Wilson and Barbieri 1995 or published through the REED project (Records of Early English Drama series) focus on public rather than corporate worship. These all underscore the public nature of confraternal civic religion, a point given particular focus in the collection of texts in Terpstra 2008 for use in public executions.
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  9. Meredith, Peter, and John E. Tailby, eds. The Staging of Religious Drama in Europe in the Later Middle Ages: Texts and Documents in English Translation. Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, Medieval Institute, 1983.
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  11. Staging religious plays was a key activity of confraternities. And while not all the texts here are confraternal, this collection of translations from English, French, German, Italian, Latin, and Spanish texts (complete with stage directions) demonstrates the interweaving of didactic and dramatic purposes.
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  13. Newbigin, Nerida. Feste d’Oltrarno: Plays in Churches in Fifteenth Century Florence. 2 vols. Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1996.
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  15. Texts of Annunciation, Ascension, and Pentecost plays performed by working-class Florentine confraternities, together with communal and confraternal records that relate dramatic production to confraternal life and that show both the extensive mechanical apparatus employed and the lighting effects used to depict the divine presence.
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  17. Perani, Mauro, and Bracha Rivlin. Vita religiosa ebraica a Bologna nel Cinquecento: Gli statuti della Confraternita dei solerti. Florence: Giuntina, 2000.
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  19. Bologna’s Jewish community numbered approximately eight hundred, including important printers and bankers, and supported eleven synagogues when these statutes were written in 1546–1547. The confraternity included women, promoted mutual assistance and education, and was active through the years of Bologna’s ghetto (1556–1569). Italian text and English translation.
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  21. Records of Early English Drama series. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978–.
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  23. The multivolume REED project of recovering pre-Shakespearean theatrical practices is organized by locality and makes available not only dramatic texts but also financial and administrative accounts of the guild, as well as ecclesiastical and governmental bodies that promoted dramatic productions—thereby setting the plays into a fuller cultural context.
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  25. Rollo-Koster, Joëlle. The People of Curial Avignon: A Critical Edition of the Liber Divisionis and the Matriculae of Notre Dame la Majour. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2009.
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  27. This diplomatic edition of the 1371 Liber Divisionis and transcribed matriculation lists for one of Avignon’s largest confraternities (Notre Dame la Majour: 1364–1381) opens a rare window onto the city’s lay religious culture and changing demographics. Names, origins, and occupations are highlighted and cross-referenced for further biographical detail.
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  29. Sánchez Herrero, José, and Silvia María Pérez González, eds. CXIX Reglas de Hermandades y Cofradías Andaluzas: Siglos XIV, XV, y XVI. Huelva, Spain: Universidad de Huelva, 2002.
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  31. The complete texts of the statutes for 119 Renaissance and early modern Andalusian confraternities, chiefly in Seville, though including other key cities such as Granada, Córdoba, and Jerez, as well as two towns in Castille. Published in CD-ROM format with introductions and topical, onomastic, and toponymic indexes.
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  33. Terpstra, Nicholas, ed. The Art of Executing Well: Rituals of Execution in Renaissance Italy. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2008.
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  35. The text of a manual used to train the confraternal comforters who assisted prisoners before death. Includes a selection of songs (laude) used in the comforting process, poems written by prisoners, contemporary broadsheets for the execution of a Jew and of a pair of lovers, and an account of the last hours of two Florentine patricians executed for conspiracy in 1513.
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  37. Wilson, Blake, and Nello Barbieri. The Florence Laudario: An Edition of Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Banco Rari 18. Recent Researches in the Music of the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance. Madison, WI: A-R Editions, 1995.
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  39. Music was fundamental to the corporate worship life of many early confraternities, and this edition of an early-14th-century laudario for the small, conservative, and non-elite Florentine company of Santo Spirito, with 108 original texts (with translations and music), demonstrates the wide range of liturgical activities they undertook.
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  41. Scholarly Periodicals
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  43. While many scholarly journals will occasionally feature articles dealing with confraternities, two deal exclusively with the subject. Confraternitas is an interdisciplinary journal featuring research on a wide geographical and disciplinary range, and the Quaderni del Centro di ricerca e di studio sul movimento dei Disciplinati deals exclusively with Italian materials.
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  45. Confraternitas. 1990–.
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  47. A biennial newsletter offering short articles, book reviews, dissertation abstracts, and announcements of research projects across all fields and time periods.
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  49. Quaderni del Centro di ricerca e di studio sul movimento dei Disciplinati. 1965–1981. New Series 2002–.
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  51. An occasional series sponsored by the Centre for the Study of the Movement of the Disciplinati at the University of Perugia, publishing editions of documents relating largely to Italian confraternities of the late medieval and Renaissance periods.
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  53. Interpretive and Area Surveys
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  55. Scholarship on confraternities has tended to develop along national lines, and the reviews in Eisenbichler 1997 and Vincent 1994 show that the most-extensive work has been on Italian and French brotherhoods. Alberigo 1962, Vincent 1994, and Lynch 2003 see brotherhoods as lay corporate responses to late medieval demographic and political challenges. Black 1989, Callahan 2001, Webster 1998, van den Hoven van Genderen and Trio 2006, and Terpstra 2006 move analysis into the early modern period and the broader phenomenon of corporatism in religious and social life.
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  57. Alberigo, Giuseppe. “Contributi alla storia delle Confraternite dei Disciplinati e della spiritualità laicale nei secc. XV e XVI.” In Il movimento dei disciplinati nel settimo centenario dal suo inizio (Perugia, 1260). Deputazione di Storia Patria per l’Umbria 9 (1962): 156–252.
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  59. Alberigo’s essay demonstrates a hitherto rare focus on lay devotion, which arose out of the same winds of change that marked Vatican II. Unlike earlier studies, his approach to confraternities aimed to see them as expressions of popular spirituality that interacted with broader devotional movements rather than simply following clerical leading.
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  61. Black, Christopher F. Italian Confraternities in the Sixteenth Century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
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  63. A comprehensive survey of the activities of confraternities across Italy, with attention to changes brought by the Catholic Church and the Counter-Reformation. Using a broad range of primary and secondary sources, Black surveys the evolution of devotional life, organization and finances, artistic patronage, liturgical changes, and a broad range of charitable activities.
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  65. Callahan, William. “Confraternities and Brotherhoods in Spain, 1500–1800.” Confraternitas 12.1 (2001): 17–25.
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  67. A brief survey of key literature in Spanish and English that highlights the statistical growth, geographical diffusion, and merging of devotional and charitable activities in lay-driven brotherhoods through the 16th century and the more clerically oriented forms that developed until the suppressions of 1784 and 1841.
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  69. Eisenbichler, Konrad. “Italian Scholarship on Pre-modern Confraternities in Italy.” Renaissance Quarterly 50.2 (1997): 567–580.
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  71. Confraternities expanded most rapidly in premodern Italy, and modern Italian scholars followed suit with an extensive literature combining local studies and broader surveys. This is the most thorough review of Italian-language scholarship available in English.
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  73. Lynch, Katherine A. Individuals, Families, and Communities in Europe, 1200–1800: The Urban Foundations of Western Society. Cambridge Studies in Population, Economy and Society in Past Time 37. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
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  75. Lynch argues that confraternities functioned as surrogate kin for migrants to urban areas at times of demographic crisis, explaining the broad emphasis on charity and mutual assistance that expands to various forms of civil society through the early modern period. Pays particular attention to the shifting role of women in these surrogate families.
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  77. Terpstra, Nicholas. “De-institutionalizing Confraternity Studies: Fraternalism and Social Capital in Cross-Cultural Contexts.” In Early Modern Confraternities in Europe and the Americas: International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Edited by Christopher Black and Pamela Gravestock, 264–283. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006.
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  79. Aims to locate confraternities in the broader context of social kinship as a cultural form and social resource. Kinship groups take different institutional shapes in different social and cultural settings through the early modern period and serve as effective forms of social organization regardless of religious confession or cultural group.
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  81. van den Hoven van Genderen, Bram, and Paul Trio. “Old Stories and New Themes: An Overview of the Historiography of Confraternities in the Low Countries from the Thirteenth to the Sixteenth Centuries.” In Religious and Laity in Western Europe, 1000–1400. Edited by Emila Jamroziak and Janet E. Burton, 357–384. Europa Sacra 2. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2006.
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  83. A survey of the historiography of Netherlandic confraternities that emphasizes the movement from the largely antiquarian and descriptive accounts of the early 20th century to the more critical and sociologically driven scholarship of the current day.
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  85. Vincent, Catherine. Les confréries médiévales dans le Royaume de France, XIIIe–XVe siècle. Paris: Albin Michel, 1994.
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  87. A definitive narrative survey of French confraternities, with rich bibliography and detailed census of local groups. Brotherhoods arose out of a collectivist impulse and through promotion by political, parochial, and episcopal authorities, with little engagement by mendicant orders. She sketches an “ideal type” of the French brotherhood to explore worship forms and religious motivations.
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  89. Webster, Susan Verdi. “Research on Confraternities in the Colonial Americas and Select Bibliography.” Confraternitas 9.1 (1998): 15–21.
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  91. A valuable survey that includes religious, social, political, and cultural dimensions of confraternities across Latin America from the 16th to the 18th centuries, with an extensive bibliography of primary sources and of key articles, monographs, and dissertations in Spanish and English.
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  93. Essay Collections
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  95. In a field of research so rich in local studies, essay collections are frequently the first venues both for specialized works and synthetic surveys. The modern study of the field can be dated to Deputazione di storia patria per l’Umbria 1962 and Vauchez 1987. While Black and Gravestock 2006 takes a broad interdisciplinary approach, many recent collections take a particular focus, such as Eisenbichler 1991 and Wisch and Ahl 2000 on the arts, Donnelly and Maher 1998 and Dompnier and Vismara 2008 on Catholic reform, and Zardin 1998 and Terpstra 2000 on politics and economics.
  96.  
  97. Black, Christopher, and Pamela Gravestock, eds. Early Modern Confraternities in Europe and the Americas: International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006.
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  99. An important status questionis collection, with an introduction and three critical reviews of recent work in drama, art, and history. The remaining twelve reviews are largely sociohistorical and art-historical studies exploring confraternal charity with the poor and prisoners, lay-clerical relations, and civic religion and cults in Italy, France, the Netherlands, and Latin America.
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  101. Deputazione di storia patria per l’Umbria. Il movimento dei disciplinati nel settimo centenario dal suo inizio (Perugia, 1260): Convegno Internazionale, Perugia, 25–28 Settembre 1960. Bollettino della Deputazione di Storia Patria per l’Umbria 9. Perugia, Italy: Deputazione di storia patria, 1962.
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  103. The modern critical study of confraternities in Italy began with a conference in Perugia marking the devotional movement of 1260. The proceedings include both transcribed documents and extensive archival studies that remain critical points of departure for interdisciplinary research into central and northern Italian cities of the late medieval period.
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  105. Dompnier, Bernard, and Paula Vismara, eds. Confréries et dévotions dans la catholicité moderne (mi-XVe–début XIXe siècle). Rome: École Française de Rome, 2008.
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  107. Eighteen essays in French and Italian, exploring distinct aspects of the cultural and material history of piety and devotion in the wake of printing and in the context of the disciplining process of the early modern period, primarily in Italy and France.
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  109. Donnelly, John P., and Michael W. Maher, eds. Confraternities and Catholic Reform in Italy, France, and Spain. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 1998.
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  111. Twelve essays that deal with social and cultural dimensions of Catholic reform from 1500 to 1650 and that reflect quite distinct historiographical approaches: institutional reform in the studies of Italian brotherhoods, sociological studies of the French, and psychological-cultural studies of the Iberian.
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  113. Eisenbichler, Konrad, ed. Crossing the Boundaries: Christian Piety and the Arts in Italian Medieval and Renaissance Confraternities. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 1991.
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  115. Twelve essays that focus on how drama, music, and art were integrated into confraternal spiritual life and corporate activity. Groups of essays deal with particular charitable activities such as the comforting of the condemned and dying and with the role of brotherhoods in education, public liturgical celebrations, and civic-religious activities.
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  117. Terpstra, Nicholas, ed. The Politics of Ritual Kinship: Confraternities and Social Order in Early Modern Italy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
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  119. Fifteen essays that explore issues of political ritual, gender relations, racial difference, dissent, and Catholic reform from 13th-century origins through 18th-century repression, with an emphasis on connecting membership, devotions, and ritual kinship to the evolution of political structures from medieval republicanism to early modern oligarchy.
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  121. Vauchez, André. Le Mouvement confraternel au Moyen Âge: France, Italie, Suisse. Geneva, Switzerland: Droz, 1987.
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  123. The fourteen essays here deal largely with religious and social dynamics in smaller towns and villages in France, Italy, and Switzerland. The book also deals with the place of confraternities in mediating lay concerns about death, charity, and social and gender relations and in providing social cohesion for clergy.
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  125. Wisch, Barbara, and Diane Cole Ahl, eds. Ritual, Spectacle, Image: Confraternities and the Visual Arts in the Italian Renaissance. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
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  127. Eleven essays that explore how confraternal patronage of art, architecture, and ritual in Florence, Bologna, and Rome arose directly out of confraternal activities and devotions and used prominent public and private commissions to deliberately reshape sacred and civic life around collective and lay-religious values.
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  129. Zardin, Danilo, ed. Corpi, “fraternità,” mestieri nella storia della società europea. Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1998.
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  131. Seventeen essays ranging across early modern Europe that aim to trace the parallels and possible organizational connections between various forms of social kinship and corporate organization, including guilds, confraternities, universities, and compagnonnages.
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  133. Cultural Activity and Patronage
  134.  
  135. Confraternities were major patrons of the arts, building churches and headquarters; commissioning paintings, music, and drama; and staging elaborate theatrical performances and processions. Though the groups were fundamentally private corporations, their cultural impact was most often distinctly and deliberately public.
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  137. Art and Architecture
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  139. Art was central to confraternal collective worship and public service, as Wisch 2006 argues. Ferretti 2008 shows how these merge on the private scale in comforting and devotion. Webster 1998 shows that confraternal sculpture is central to public processions, while Levin 2004, Sohm 1982, and Webster 2006 note how confraternal art patronage underscores educational and devout purposes of public space.
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  141. Ferretti, Massimo. “In Your Face: Paintings for the Condemned in Renaissance Italy.” In The Art of Executing Well: Rituals of Execution in Renaissance Italy. Edited by Nicholas Terpstra, 79–97. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2008.
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  143. Though it has long been assumed that most of the portable paintings (tavolette) used to instruct and comfort condemned prisoners have been lost, a careful examination of collections across Europe reveals instances dating back to the beginnings of lay comforting in the 1330s and showing exemplary images of martyrdom.
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  145. Levin, William R. The Allegory of Mercy at the Misericordia in Florence: Historiography, Context, Iconography, and the Documentation of Confraternal Charity in the Trecento. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2004.
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  147. The Misericordia was among the most important Florentine confraternities, and the merging of art and charity was at the heart of its community and identity. This study connects its monumental public 1342 fresco of Mercy with the wide range of activities it undertook in the city in the aftermath of the Black Death.
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  149. Sohm, Philip L. The Scuola Grande di San Marco 1437–1550: The Architecture of a Venetian Lay Confraternity. Outstanding Dissertations in the Fine Arts. New York: Garland, 1982.
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  151. Explores the architecture, sculpture, and painting of a leading Venetian confraternity, setting these in the context of contemporary confraternal patronage and the demands each faced of balancing private and public spaces both for worship and charity at a time when the Venetian state was increasing both its support for and expectations of these brotherhoods.
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  153. Webster, Susan Verdi. Art and Ritual in Golden-Age Spain: Sevillian Confraternities and the Processional Sculpture of Holy Week. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998.
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  155. Extraordinary illusionistic sculptures were central components in confraternal devotional processions, and Webster’s richly illustrated study explores how ritual function created a distinct and underrated sculptural genre that animated penitential devotions and stimulated dramatic public responses.
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  157. Webster, Susan Verdi. “Confraternities as Patrons of Architecture in Colonial Quito, Ecuador.” In Early Modern Confraternities in Europe and the Americas: International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Edited by Christopher Black and Pamela Gravestock, 204–225. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006.
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  159. Confraternities were major patrons of architecture in Latin America and competed intensely within cities and across different regions. Common forms, decorations, and locations point to practical communication among brotherhoods, while pursuit of devotional consumption created some of the most distinctive and magnificent buildings on the Continent.
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  161. Wisch, Barbara. “Incorporating Images: Some Themes and Tasks for Confraternity Studies and Early Modern Visual Culture.” In Early Modern Confraternities in Europe and the Americas: International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Edited by Christopher Black and Pamela Gravestock, 243–263. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006.
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  163. An authoritative survey and agenda arguing that studies of confraternities as corporate patrons of art and architecture must move beyond studies of particular works and instead set this activity into religious, civic, and cultural matrices of urban and rural life over time.
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  165. Drama
  166.  
  167. Confraternities’ cultural production was both public and private, and they were important and often-innovative patrons. They used dramatic productions of spiritual texts in order to educate their members and the broader local public, as Newbigin 2006 argues. Blasting 1989, Falvey 2008, Johnston 1975, and Newbigin 2000 underscore the public didactic purpose of drama, while Reid 2006, van Bruaene 2006, and Waite 2000 note the additional importance of socialization within the brotherhoods.
  168.  
  169. Blasting, Ralph. “The German Bruderschaften as Producers of Late Medieval Vernacular Religious Drama.” Renaissance and Reformation 25.1 (1989): 1–14.
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  171. Lay brotherhoods composed largely of artisans promoted popular religious education and their own socialization through vernacular plays acted by the brothers themselves and produced in public squares and markets on holy days. This article surveys two hundred vernacular plays before focusing on two towns.
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  173. Falvey, Kathleen. “Scaffold and Stage: Comforting Rituals and Dramatic Traditions in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy.” In The Art of Executing Well: Rituals of Execution in Renaissance Italy. Edited by Nicholas Terpstra, 13–30. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2008.
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  175. Confraternal drama sometimes included scenes of executions (e.g., John the Baptist) and reenactments of Christ’s Passion, which in turn provided literature and models for those groups of confratelli who comforted condemned prisoners; juxtaposing dramatic texts with comforters’ literature demonstrates the interpenetration of these models and forms.
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  177. Johnston, Alexandra F. “The Plays and the Religious Guilds of York: The Creed Play and the Pater Noster Play.” Speculum 50.1 (1975): 55–90.
  178. DOI: 10.2307/2856513Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  179. English confraternities typically took the form of religious guilds with a closer parochial connection. This is among the first studies to highlight the extent, profile, and importance of confraternity plays, not only as vehicles of group socialization and public religious instruction but also as key producers of pre-Shakespearean drama.
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  181. Newbigin, Nerida. “The Decorum of the Passion: The Plays of the Confraternity of the Gonfalone in the Roman Colosseum, 1490–1539.” In Confraternities and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Italy: Ritual, Spectacle, Image. Edited by Barbara Wisch and Diane Cole Ahl, 173–202. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
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  183. The Holy Week plays of the Gonfalone confraternity sparked anti-Semitic riots over many of the five decades when they were performed, because of their compelling insistence on targeting Jews for the death of Christ.
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  185. Newbigin, Nerida. “Docere Delectando: Confraternal Drama Studies and the Academy.” In Early Modern Confraternities in Europe and the Americas: International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Edited by Christopher Black and Pamela Gravestock, 226–242. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006.
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  187. A wide-ranging review of scholarship since the 1960s on confraternal drama in Italy, France, England, and the Netherlands, with an emphasis on research activity that is connected to reconstruction and performance of period plays.
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  189. Reid, Dylan. “Piety, Poetry, and Politics: Rouen’s Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception and the French Wars of Religion.” In Early Modern Confraternities in Europe and the Americas: International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Edited by Christopher Black and Pamela Gravestock, 151–170. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006.
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  191. An application of the concepts of “bonding” and “bridging” social capital to a confraternity whose cultural program provided a means of strengthening fragmented social relations within a city’s elite during a period of religio-political tension, as much through literary activities as through spiritual exercises.
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  193. van Bruaene, Anne-Laure. “In principio erat verbum: Drama, Devotion, Reformation and Urban Association in the Low Countries.” In Early Modern Confraternities in Europe and the Americas: International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Edited by Christopher Black and Pamela Gravestock, 64–80. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006.
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  195. While confraternities declined in the 16th century, fraternal groups expanded. Dutch Chambers of Rhetoric were distinct expressions of social and ritual kinship promoted by civic-minded artisans in search of communal harmony. Their literary competitions and anticlerical plays may have helped prepare members for more-radical protestant ideas.
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  197. Waite, Gary. Reformers on Stage: Popular Drama and Religious Propaganda in the Low Countries of Charles V, 1515–1556. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000.
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  199. The most accomplished study of the interlinked religious and political messages of the Chambers of Rhetoric. Surveys the Habsburg Netherlands before focusing on three points: an influential 1539 regional competition in Ghent, the largely Lutheran and circumspect chambers active in Antwerp, and the largely Anabaptist and disruptive chambers in Amsterdam.
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  201. Music
  202.  
  203. Music was more often a feature of private collective devotion, as Glixon 2003, O’Regan 1995, Østrem and Peterson 2004, and Wilson 1992 demonstrate, though Gravestock 2008 shows that, like art, it could be incorporated into public liturgical and devotional activities.
  204.  
  205. Glixon, Jonathan. Honoring God and the City: Music at the Venetian Confraternities, 1260–1807. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
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  207. Confraternities were critical innovators and patrons in composition and performance. Glixon traces a first period of amateur performance directed to devotional and ritual life (1260–1500), a period of professional performance for civic glory and reputation (1500–1650), and a slow decline as economic factors crimped resources and ritual life.
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  209. Gravestock, Pamela. “Comforting with Song: Using Laude to Assist Condemned Prisoners.” In The Art of Executing Well: Rituals of Execution in Renaissance Italy. Edited by Nicholas Terpstra, 31–51. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2008.
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  211. Confraternities that comforted prisoners condemned to execution assembled collections of laude to sing to and possibly with the prisoners on the eve of their execution. The songs were often direct, poignant, and penitential, and some collections included songs written by prisoners themselves. Includes a list of incipits.
  212. Find this resource:
  213. O’Regan, Noel. Institutional Patronage in Post-Tridentine Rome: Music at Santissima Trinità dei Pellegrini 1550–1650. London: Royal Music Association, 1995.
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  215. Trinità employed many major composers, including Palestrina, and was as critical to Roman musical patronage as to larger clerical establishments. This volume shows how social and religious factors shaped the brotherhoods and their music and how confraternities fit both into Tridentine patronage networks and also into the intense competition for prestige and influence.
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  217. Østrem, Eyolf, and Nils Holger Peterson. “The Singing of Laude and Musical Sensibilities in Early Seventeenth Century Confraternity Devotion: Part 1.” Journal of Religious History 28.3 (2004): 276–297.
  218. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9809.2004.00244.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  219. The first part of this article looks at devotional use of progressive music in a Florentine youth confraternity, using the brotherhoods’ religious and musical practices to explore development of aesthetic sensibility. The second part (in Journal of Religious History 29.2 [2005]: 163–176) considers an unusual manuscript of polyphonic laude found in the Cathedral archives.
  220. Find this resource:
  221. Wilson, Blake. Music and Merchants: The Laudesi Companies of Republican Florence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
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  223. Reviews the musical life of twelve confraternities from the late 13th to early 16th centuries, with attention to professional and amateur performance as generated in relation to spiritual life, vernacular liturgy, devotional rituals, musicians’ performance, and practice. Argues for the importance of music to ritual life and of instruments to performance.
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  225. Devotions and Ecclesiastical Relations
  226.  
  227. Confraternities were the lay face of the church, and many Catholics would channel their religious worship as much through their confraternal brotherhoods as through their parish or guild. Some began as burial societies and evolved into a broad range of worship activities including weekly services, the sacraments of confession and communion, processions, and civic religious activities. The confraternity was a flexible cultural form adapted by Jewish and Muslim communities and that also helped to organize sociability in colonial and missionary societies. Many key forms of confraternal worship and organization were models for Protestant church congregations and were incorporated into Catholic missionary activity.
  228.  
  229. Death and Memorialization
  230.  
  231. Confraternities provided extensive burial and requiem services from the beginning, and this function led some historians, such as in Chiffoleau 1980, to propose that their emergence reflected broad shifts in public psychology around death, with death becoming the brotherhoods’ primary raison d’être. Banker 1988 and Edgerton 1985 represent less functionalist responses that emphasize how confraternities expressed collective lay religious responses to death, without being defined entirely by this activity.
  232.  
  233. Banker, James. Death in the Community: Memorialization and Confraternities in an Italian Commune in the Late Middle Ages. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1988.
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  235. A thorough study of confraternal mediation of death, burial, and requiem observances in the absence of a strong clerical establishment and in the context of civic religion. Engages directly with Aries and Chiffoleau and finds that death activated social mechanisms of great emotional intensity while building influential and wealthy lay religious institutions.
  236. Find this resource:
  237. Chiffoleau, Jacques. La comptabilité de l’au-delà: Les hommes, la mort, e la religion dans la région de l’Avignon à la fin de Moyen-Age (vers 1320–vers 1480). Rome: École Francais de Rome, 1980.
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  239. The classic account, framed anthropologically, of how late medieval cultural melancholy was driven by a sense of rupture in relations with the dead. Overcoming isolation and establishing a Christian framework for relations to the afterlife stimulated creation of confraternities as forms of collective life and sociability aimed primarily around death, burial, and memorialization.
  240. Find this resource:
  241. Edgerton, Samuel Y. Pictures and Punishment: Art and Criminal Prosecution during the Florentine Renaissance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985.
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  243. Paintings were used to legitimate public justice, to defame contumacious criminals, and to comfort those bound for the scaffold, an activity undertaken by Italian confraternities in particular. Edgerton reviews the art and varied motivations both of Florentine and Roman confraternities, with attention to the latter’s most famous member, Michelangelo.
  244. Find this resource:
  245. Devotions, Rituals, and Piety
  246.  
  247. Devotional movements gave rise to confraternities, as Bornstein 1993 demonstrates, yet Dillon 2003 and Winston-Allen 1997 also show that religious orders often used the brotherhoods to spread new devotions. Schneider 1986 and Bernardi 2000 note that their close association with processions and public rituals made them key liturgists in those central devotions such as Corpus Domini, which were meant to represent the entire community at worship.
  248.  
  249. Bernardi, Claudio. “Corpus Domini: Ritual Metamorphoses and Social Changes in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Genoa.” In The Politics of Ritual Kinship: Confraternities and Social Order in Early Modern Italy. Edited by Nicholas Terpstra, 228–242. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
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  251. Confraternities were vehicles for factionalism in late medieval Genoa. The combined efforts by political and ecclesiastical authorities to suppress disputes merged with Catholic promotion of new brotherhoods—and the ritual lure of baroque piety—to turn them into bearers of aristocratic values to the end of the ancien regime.
  252. Find this resource:
  253. Bornstein, Daniel E. The Bianchi of 1399: Popular Devotion in Late Medieval Italy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993.
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  255. The Bianchi movement spawned many confraternities devoted to “peace and mercy” and was an expression of what Bornstein calls “popular orthodoxy”: a convergence of religious and political concerns that demonstrates the power of civic religion and belies efforts to drive a wedge between lay and clerical Catholicism.
  256. Find this resource:
  257. Dillon, Anne. “Praying by Number: The confraternity of the Rosary and the English Catholic Community, c. 1580–1700.” History 88.291 (2003): 451–471.
  258. DOI: 10.1111/1468-229X.00273Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  259. Rosary devotion was ubiquitous among early modern English Catholics, and while once seen as simply a medieval remnant, Dillon argues that it flourished as a direct result of Jesuit efforts to adapt it to English conditions as devotion that was discrete, didactic, and separate.
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  261. Schneider, Robert. “Mortification on Parade: Penitential Processions in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France.” Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme 10.1 (February 1986): 123–146.
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  263. Against those who have seen baroque flagellation as part of a lachrymose, populist, and sometimes violent piety, Schneider argues that French penitents were a tightly disciplined elite who used processions deliberately, in pursuit of decorum and order.
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  265. Winston-Allen, Anne. Stories of the Rose: The Making of the Rosary in the Middle Ages. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997.
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  267. The Rosary devotion was promoted aggressively by the Dominican order, with distinctive supralocal confraternities enrolling hundreds of thousands of devotees. Rosary confraternities both recall the fraternal alliances established by medieval mendicants and anticipate the Tridentine sodalities by which the Jesuits built an influential following.
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  269. Lay-Clerical Relations
  270.  
  271. The portrayal of confraternities as alternative consensual parishes (Le Bras 1955–1956) carries within it the potential for jurisdictional conflict between laity and secular clergy. Black 1998 has argued that this was perhaps less a general reality than was once portrayed, Eckstein 2004 offers numerous cases of collaboration, and Trio 1985 and Trio 2006 show that clerical groups could metamorphose into lay groups, which suggested fewer divisions between the two social categories. Relations with regular clergy, and particularly the mendicants, could be far closer. Meersseman 1977 demonstrates that orders saw the brotherhoods as necessary auxiliaries to spreading their devotional work, while Terpstra 1996 emphasizes that distinct orders took quite different approaches to confraternities with quite different results. See also Reformations.
  272.  
  273. Black, Christopher. “Confraternities and the Parish in the Context of Italian Catholic Reform.” In Confraternities and Catholic Reform in Italy, France, and Spain. Edited by John P. Donnelly and Michael W. Maher, 1–26. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 1998.
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  275. Italian dioceses employed various forms of local geographical organization before Trent. However, the spread of parochial forms afterward was marked by considerable interaction and cooperation between existing and new confraternities and the parish clergy until at least the 18th century, when more fraternities resisted control by parish priests.
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  277. Eckstein, Nicholas, ed. Journal of Religious History 28.1 (February 2004).
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  279. A collection of six articles dealing with the social, educational, dramatic, and charitable activities of Italian confraternities from the 14th through the 18th centuries.
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  281. Le Bras, Gabriel. Études de Sociologie Religieuse. 2 vols. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1955–1956.
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  283. The influential study that shaped French scholarship in particular. Le Bras presented the confraternity as a voluntary “consensual parish” in which lay people’s drive for independence resulted in disruptive competition with clergy around matters of control, worship, and influence.
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  285. Meersseman, Gilles Gerard. Ordo fraternitatis: Confraternite e pietà dei laici nel Medioevo. 3 vols. Rome: Herder editrice e libreria, 1977.
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  287. A monumental study reaching from the Carolingian period to the 15th century and tracing emerging forms of confraternal life, with an emphasis on Dominican confraternities in central and northern Italy, both as they expressed lay piety and penitence and as they cooperated with Dominican activity. Includes editions of key documents.
  288. Find this resource:
  289. Terpstra, Nicholas. “Confraternities and Mendicant Orders: The Dynamics of Lay and Clerical Brotherhood in Renaissance Bologna.” Catholic Historical Review 82.1 (1996): 1–22.
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  291. Confraternities patterned themselves on mendicant orders, and many orders promoted brotherhoods; yet, the different orders related to confraternities in quite different ways. While most orders, including Franciscans, Augustinians, and Servites, supported lay agency, the Dominicans saw confraternities as auxiliaries to their order and exercised more oversight and control.
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  293. Trio, Paul. “A Medieval Students’ Confraternity at Ypres: The Notre Dame Confraternity of Paris Students.” History of Universities 5 (1985): 15–53.
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  295. Fundamentally, an alumni group or professional association formed by Paris-trained clerics who met monthly and worked assiduously promoting socialization, professional advancement, and mutual assistance. These predated the 13th-century emergence of lay confraternities and initially excluded lay members.
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  297. Trio, Paul. “Lay Persons in Power: The Crumbling of the Clerical Monopoly on Urban Devotion in Flanders, as a Result of the Rise of Lay Confraternities in the Late Middle Ages.” In Early Modern Confraternities in Europe and the Americas: International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Edited by Christopher Black and Pamela Gravestock, 53–63. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006.
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  299. An important survey by a leading historian of Flemish confraternities on how the largely clerical confraternities established in the 13th century are gradually laicized, and how, together with guilds and Chambers of Rhetoric, they come to express a more civic, lay, and artisanal religion that could conflict with clerical interests.
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  301. Cross-Cultural Dynamics
  302.  
  303. Catholicism’s public liturgical forms and institutional structures were a cultural resource that were adapted by groups whose relations to Rome were either nonexistent or potentially conflictual. They were sometimes employed to advance Asian and American missions, though Costa 2007 and Meyers and Hopkins 1988 demonstrate that they developed into more-autonomous groups with distinct missions. Horowitz 2001 notes that the public nature of confraternal devotional processions gave them a cultural neutrality that could be adapted by other religious groups, while Fasana 2001 carries this forward with discussions of Orthodox and Muslim confraternities. Both Farris 1984 and Isaievych 1991 explore how subordinated cultural communities used confraternities to organize socio-religious resistance against political overlords.
  304.  
  305. Costa, João Paulo Oliviera e.. “The Brotherhoods (Confrarias) and Lay Support for the Early Christian Church in Japan.” Japanese Journal for Religious Studies 34.1 (2007): 67–84.
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  307. While most mission churches developed in a colonial context, the Japanese and Chinese churches did not, and their success was in part due to the extensive spread of confraternities as self-governing structures that fostered worship, socialization, and the wider engagement of locals in the life of the church.
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  309. Farris, Nancy. Mayan Society under Colonial Rule: The Collective Enterprise of Survival. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984.
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  311. Mayan confraternities were initially promoted by Spanish authorities as agents for the conversion and acculturation of indigenous groups, but they gradually matured into vehicles of resistance that successfully resisted and subverted Spanish authority in Mayan territories.
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  313. Fasana, Enrico, ed. Le confraternite cristiane e musulmane: Storia, devozione, politica. Trieste, Italy: Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2001.
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  315. A somewhat eclectic collection of eight studies, spanning the late medieval to the 20th century, that offer rare discussions of Orthodox confraternities in the Balkans and central Europe from the 13th through 17th centuries and of Islamic confraternities in Africa and India in the 19th and 20th centuries.
  316. Find this resource:
  317. Horowitz, Elliott. “Processions, Piety, and Jewish Confraternities.” In The Jews of Early Modern Venice. Edited by Robert C. Davis and Benjamin Ravid, 231–247. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
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  319. Public processions were not part of Jewish worship until the 16th century, when these rituals were adapted from Catholic models, sometimes against resistance within the community. A key form was the funeral procession, often enlivened by torches in a direct borrowing from contemporary Catholic forms.
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  321. Isaievych, Iaroslav. “Eastern Rite Lay Confraternities in Ukraine and Byelorussia.” Confraternitas 2.2 (1991): 3–6.
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  323. Orthodox confraternities preserved a Ukrainian cultural identity in resistance to the Roman Catholicism of the Polish-Lithuanian state and became self-governing bodies for education, socialization, and worship. They resisted Eastern Rite union in 1596, moving into opposition to their own upper clergy as a result.
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  325. Meyers, Albert, and Diane Elizabeth Hopkins. Manipulating the Saints: Religious Brotherhoods and Social Integration in Post-conquest Latin America. Hamburg, Germany: Wayasbah, 1988.
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  327. A wide-ranging collection of twelve essays dealing with the emergence of indigenous Catholicism in various areas (chiefly, Peru, Mexico, and Guatemala) through the form of brotherhoods. Pays attention to local dynamics of race, gender, and urban-rural sociology, and with an emphasis on internally generated religious cultures rather than mission-driven Catholicism.
  328. Find this resource:
  329. Jewish Confraternities
  330.  
  331. The corporate kin group was not uniquely Catholic, and from at least the 13th century, Jewish communities found it to be a helpful social resource for organizing religious activity. While Ruderman 1976 has emphasized the Jewish confraternity as an indigenous development within the Jewish communities, Horowitz 1987 also highlights these communities’ adaptation of the social and liturgical forms around them.
  332.  
  333. Horowitz, Elliot. “Jewish Confraternal Piety in the Veneto in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.” In Gli Ebrei a Venezia. Edited by Gaetano Cozzi, 301–313. Milan: Edizioni Communità, 1987.
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  335. Religious associations known as hevrot emerged in 13th-century Jewish communities and developed in Italy from the 16th century. Early benevolent associations developed spiritual and educational mandates and became vehicles for sociability as they also expanded from elite to a broader membership.
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  337. Ruderman, David. “The Founding of a Gemilut Hasadim Society in Ferrara in 1515.” AJS Review 1 (1976): 233–268.
  338. DOI: 10.1017/S0364009400000118Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  339. Social groups had been common in Spanish Jewish communities, but Ferrara’s Gemilut Hasadim brotherhood was among the first sodalities that emerged to communally address spreading poverty and illness among Italian Jews; Ruderman sees this as an indigenous development not dependent either on Catholic or Sephardic examples.
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  341. Reformations
  342.  
  343. Lay religious groups could be either the bearers of reform impulses initiated by clergy, or forms of reaction against these, and this tension existed from at least the origins of the mendicant movements to the Enlightenment. Kaplan 2000 and Lennon 1995 highlight how these tensions emerged within the Reformation period as Protestant officials suppressed the brotherhoods on suspicion of their being too beholden to Catholic clergy. Chatellier 1989, Lazar 2005, and Lewis 2000 show that the new orders of the 16th century, and particularly the Jesuits, saw the brotherhoods as strategic elements of Catholic reform, while Harding 1980 and Zardin 2000 caution that they could promote their own anticlerical reform agendas or develop into sites of resistance against the efforts of even powerful clerical reformers such as Carlo Borromeo. Eisenbichler 2000 shows how the Enlightenment carried on the close association of political suppression with religious reform, even before the French Revolution.
  344.  
  345. Chatellier, Louis. The Europe of the Devout: The Catholic Reformation and the Formation of a New Society. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
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  347. A critical work that examines the dense network of Jesuit sodalities that advanced Tridentine reforms from the end of the council through to the suppression of the order. Their goal moved beyond religious devotion to a broad-ranging reform of society built heavily on devotion, discipline, and sociability.
  348. Find this resource:
  349. Eisenbichler, Konrad. “The Suppression of Confraternities in Enlightenment Florence.” In The Politics of Ritual Kinship: Confraternities and Social Order in Early Modern Italy. Edited by Nicholas Terpstra, 262–278. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
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  351. The ritual excesses of baroque confraternities triggered sharp reactions from Enlightenment critics of religious superstition, privilege, and waste. This in turn led to suppressions of all but charitable brotherhoods by many of the proponents of rational religion and government, such as Tuscany’s Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo, even before the coming of Napoleon.
  352. Find this resource:
  353. Harding, Robert. “The Mobilization of Confraternities against the Reformation.” Sixteenth Century Journal 11.2 (Summer 1980): 85–107.
  354. DOI: 10.2307/2540034Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  355. Examines four different types of confraternity to show that while many resisted Protestantism and aimed to promote Catholic devotions, there was no single pattern to their activities. Some were anticlerical reformers in their own right. Acts of violence were usually suppressed by Catholic elites fearful of broader upheavals.
  356. Find this resource:
  357. Kaplan, Benjamin J. “A Clash of Values: The Survival of Utrecht’s Confraternities after the Reformation and the Debate over their Dissolution.” De zeventiende eeuw 16.2 (2000): 100–117.
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  359. Many of Utrecht’s confraternities survived formal suppression in the late 16th century, by dropping cultic functions, expanding charitable work, and recruiting Protestants into what became ecumenical expressions of civic religion. As a result, both Protestants and Catholics strongly opposed an attempted suppression by civic officials in 1615.
  360. Find this resource:
  361. Lazar, Lance. Working in the Vineyard of the Lord: Jesuit Confraternities in Early Modern Italy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005.
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  363. Among new orders, the Jesuits were the most effective in using confraternities to build lay support and implement charitable and educational programs. This well-documented study concentrates on work with prostitutes and Jewish and Muslim converts in Rome and offers a geographical and chronological survey of Italy.
  364. Find this resource:
  365. Lennon, Colm, “The Survival of the Confraternities in Post-Reformation Dublin.” Confraternitas 6.1 (Spring 1995): 5–12.
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  367. Confraternities united Gaelic and Anglo-Norman believers in opposition to the Henrician Church of Ireland, maintaining Catholic worship covertly and responding to a 1569 papal injunction to promote missions by using their properties and financial resources to covertly support Catholic clergy and laity.
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  369. Lewis, Mark. “The Development of Jesuit Confraternal Activity in the Kingdom of Naples in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.” In The Politics of Ritual Kinship: Confraternities and Social Order in Early Modern Italy. Edited by Nicholas Terpstra, 210–227. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
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  371. Shows how the Jesuits made confraternities a fundamental part of their mission strategy from their arrival in Naples in 1552, supporting some older groups but founding more new ones to promote charity, to organize supporters, to disseminate the spiritual exercises, and to train students (particularly through the Marian Congregations).
  372. Find this resource:
  373. Zardin, Danilo. “Relaunching Confraternities in the Tridentine Era: Shaping Conscience and Christianizing Society in Milan and Lombardy.” In The Politics of Ritual Kinship: Confraternities and Social Order in Early Modern Italy. Edited by Nicholas Terpstra, 190–209. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
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  375. While Carlo Borromeo is often portrayed as a powerful driver of reform, resistance from lay confraternities curbed his plans to integrate brotherhoods into parochial hierarchies and forced the continuity of traditional ritual practices and administrative forms. As a result, Borromean reformation often incorporated many older privileges and values in practice.
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  377. Political and Sociological Dimensions
  378.  
  379. Confraternities were frequently the only collective groups that formally gathered youths and women. They were also key players in local civic religion as the custodians of shrines and processions, the administrators of charitable institutions and poor relief, the agents of socialization, and the providers of sociability. In most communities their work in organizing economic life, charity, education, shrines, and public ritual gave them a deeply political significance, and this was particularly the case in colonial and cross-cultural situations in which the sociability they provided became a means for organizing marginalized and oppressed groups. Though emerging first in towns and cities, their characteristic combination of mutual assistance and lay worship spread rapidly into the countryside as well and promoted continuities in public devotions and local religion between urban and rural society.
  380.  
  381. Age and Gender
  382.  
  383. While fraternities, no less than other contemporary corporate groups, implicitly favored male adult socialization and activity, they did not initially exclude either women or youth. Casagrande 2000 notes that women formed a significant proportion of confraternal membership in the medieval period, even if their administrative roles were limited, and Esposito 1994 shows that charity toward women generally and young girls in particular was central to many confraternities’ activities. Terpstra 1990 emphasizes that women’s marginalization in the 15th century came through devotional reform movements. Dinan 1999 and Tran 2004 show that as reform movements spawned gender-specific groups, women were able to use confraternal organization to carve out rare degrees of independent action, though Terpstra 2010 notes that in times of overt conflict the women’s initiatives might be deliberately suppressed. The drive to religious socialization persuaded many communities of the value of confraternities directed specifically toward the young, as Eisenbichler 1998, Horowitz 1985, and Polizzotto 2004 demonstrate.
  384.  
  385. Casagrande, Giovanna. “Confraternities and Female Lay Religiosity in Late Medieval and Renaissance Umbria.” In The Politics of Ritual Kinship: Confraternities and Social Order in Early Modern Italy. Edited by Nicholas Terpstra, 48–66. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
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  387. Women joined medieval confraternities in great numbers, though they had only marginal roles organizationally and kept to private devotions and charitable activity. Potential for female activity expanded as parochial, Sacrament, and Rosary confraternities multiplied from the 16th century, and as ecclesiastical officials became more concerned with forms of social control.
  388. Find this resource:
  389. Dinan, Susan. “Confraternities as a Venue for Female Activism during the Catholic Reformation.” In Confraternities and Catholic Reform in Italy, France, and Spain. Edited by John P. Donnelly and Michael W. Maher, 191–213. Kirksville, MO: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1999.
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  391. After Trent, women who desired to carry out public charity as a vocation and in the community had few options. The French Daughters of Charity deliberately adopted confraternal organization in order to avoid Tridentine regulations on enclosure while exercising public communal charity, developing into a hybrid of order and confraternity.
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  393. Eisenbichler, Konrad. The Boys of the Archangel Raphael. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998.
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  395. This interdisciplinary study of the oldest of Florence’s nine youth confraternities, from its origin until its suppression, tracks the brotherhood’s history and cultural life as a key vehicle for socializing adolescent and young adult males. Eisenbichler considers the brotherhood’s shifting social composition in response to Florence’s political evolution from oligarchic republic to absolutist state.
  396. Find this resource:
  397. Esposito, Anna. “Ad dotandum puellas virgines, pauperes et honestas: Social Needs and Confraternal Charities in Rome in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries.” Renaissance and Reformation 18.2 (1994): 5–18.
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  399. The confraternity of Annunziata was a leader among 15th-century Roman confraternities, offering dowries to the growing number of respectable poor girls whose families were unable to provide support. This study reviews how funds were administered and recipients were chosen, comparing confraternal practices to local customs.
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  401. Horowitz, Elliott. “A Jewish Youth Confraternity in Seventeenth Century Italy.” Italia 5.1–2 (1985): 36–97.
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  403. An exercise in exploring how confraternal organization advanced both the education and the socialization of young unmarried males in communities that were often under threat suppression or expulsion and had to deal with the dislocations brought on by highly mobile populations, which made it difficult to develop formal institutions.
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  405. Polizzotto, Lorenzo. Children of the Promise: The Confraternity of the Purification and the Socialization of Youths in Florence, 1427–1785. Oxford-Warburg Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
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  407. Polizzotto’s study follows a youth brotherhood through shifting political alliances and the cultural shift from optimism to pessimism about youth. This confraternity gathered 20 percent of Florentine adolescent males in the mid-15th century. While baroque devotional consumption replaced an early asceticism, Polizzotto finds the brotherhood fostered civic values until its suppression in 1785.
  408. Find this resource:
  409. Terpstra, Nicholas. “Women in the Brotherhood: Gender, Class and Politics in Renaissance Bolognese Confraternities.” Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réform 26.3 (1990): 193–212.
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  411. Women joined some confraternities in numbers equal to men until Observant devotional reforms pushed them to the margins from the mid-15th century onward. Artisanal men were then marginalized by a process of ennobling that transformed the larger, wealthier, charitable confraternities from the later 15th century onward.
  412. Find this resource:
  413. Terpstra, Nicholas. Lost Girls: Sex and Death in Renaissance Florence. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.
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  415. This study of an orphanage established by a confraternity of women in 16th-century Florence explores the intersection of politics, gender, and charity. Adherents of the Savonarolan movement, the women sheltered marginalized and dying girls until the Medici and local archbishop assumed control and began its transition into a convent.
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  417. Tran, Nhung Tuyet. “Les Amantes de la Croix: An Early Modern Vietnamese Lay Confraternity.” In Le Viȇt Nam au Féminin. Edited by Gisèle L. Bousquet and Nora A. Taylor. Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2004.
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  419. Most Catholic converts in Vietnam were women, and lay confraternal communities gave them a form of communal life that allowed them collectively to resist family pressures to marry and clerical pressures toward claustration. They offered shelter, subsistence, and education, supported themselves with farms and marketing, and extended charity to poor women—particularly prostitutes.
  420. Find this resource:
  421. Charity and Civil Society
  422.  
  423. Almost all confraternities devoted themselves to the communal good, and in most instances this entailed a significant emphasis both on mutual assistance and charity to needy groups within their neighborhoods or towns. Confraternities’ support of their own members often expanded into significant institutional forms, as Flynn 1989, Henderson 1994, and Terpstra 2005 all demonstrate. In other cases, as Pullan 1971 and Sá 2002 demonstrate, governments deliberately appointed confraternities in order to take on important charitable roles on the civic, national, or colonial scale.
  424.  
  425. Flynn, Maureen. Sacred Charity: Confraternities and Social Welfare in Spain, 1400–1700. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1989.
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  427. A study of the intersections of Catholic reform piety, local politics, and confraternal charity in the town of Zamora in western Castile, where there was one confraternity for every fourteen households. Baroque piety transformed charity from an inherently salvific act into the emotive demonstration of faith and saving grace.
  428. Find this resource:
  429. Henderson, John. Piety and Charity in Late Medieval Florence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
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  431. A survey of Florentine confraternities that aims to offer a comprehensive guide to their origins and activities, with an emphasis on food distribution, health care, and other forms of charity. Florentine governments recognized both the danger and potential of confraternities from an early stage, and this volume traces some of the vicissitudes that resulted.
  432. Find this resource:
  433. Pullan, Brian. Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice: The Social Institutions of a Renaissance State, to 1620. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971.
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  435. The first modern critical study of confraternities in English, and still a standard reference on the activities of Venice’s major confraternities (scuole grandi) in their evolution as major agencies of charitable and economic activity under state auspices. Pullan challenged the notion that Catholic charity was sporadic, inefficient, and clerical.
  436. Find this resource:
  437. Sá, Isabella dos Guimarães. “Assistance to the Poor on a Royal Model: The Example of the Misericórdias in the Portuguese Empire from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century.” Confraternitas 13.1 (2002): 3–14.
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  439. One of the rare studies in English of the extensive activities of the Misericordia confraternities that operated under royal charter and patronage, organized lay devotions and charity, and exercised some judicial functions across Portugal and throughout the empire, serving as a model for parallel Spanish efforts.
  440. Find this resource:
  441. Terpstra, Nicholas. Abandoned Children of the Italian Renaissance: Orphan Care in Florence and Bologna. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.
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  443. Orphanages in both cities were established and run by confraternities, but their organization and modes of governance highlight significant differences in the political and religious cultures of the two cities: for example, Bolognese confraternities retained older communal and republican forms, while Florentine confraternities followed the bureaucratic models of absolutist bureaucracy.
  444. Find this resource:
  445. Civic Religion and Politics
  446.  
  447. Emerging together with medieval communal governments, confraternities often assumed a critical role as the organizers of the shrines, processions, and activities that expressed the community’s trust in and obligation to divine authority. Muir 1981 shows that ritual life advertised political and divine favor, and while Dieterich 1989 and Trio 1993 suggest that this assumption of religious and liturgical functions need not be seen as a challenge to the clergy, Terpstra 1995 and Cossar 2006 show that religious sanction became critical to establishing the priority of particular social groups over others. Eisenbichler 1994 and Polizzotto 1994 demonstrate the plasticity of confraternal forms in the civic context, because they could be employed by those seeking either to undermine republican rule in an oligarchical context—or undermine oligarchical rule in a republican context.
  448.  
  449. Cossar, Roisin. The Transformation of the Laity in Bergamo, 1265–c. 1400. Leiden, The Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 2006.
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  451. The powerful confraternal hospital of the Misericordia Maggiore became a critical vehicle for informal and formal authority exercised by Bergamo’s elite, to the detriment of women and poor men. While the institutional framework of lay civic religion gave stronger voice to elite males, some marginal characters found agency through the MIA.
  452. Find this resource:
  453. Dieterich, D. Henry. “Confraternities and Lay Leadership in Sixteenth-Century Liège.” Renaissance and Reformation 25.1 (1989): 15–35.
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  455. Challenges the influential view of Gabriel Le Bras that the confraternity was a voluntary “consensual parish” frequently in conflict with ecclesiastical structures, proposing instead that 15th-century Liège offers examples of laity and clergy collaborating in a broader fulfillment of common religious and social goals.
  456. Find this resource:
  457. Eisenbichler, Konrad. “Lorenzo de’Medici and the Confraternity of the Blacks in Florence.” Fides et Historia 26.1 (1994): 85–98.
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  459. Lorenzo de’Medici joined many confraternities as a strategy combining patronage and surveillance. Among these was the confraternity that comforted prisoners condemned to death. Confraternity records show him to have been a valued though largely inactive member who apparently did not join in the brotherhood’s signal charitable activity.
  460. Find this resource:
  461. Muir, Edward. Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981.
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  463. Standard study of ritual as a key language of social and political engagement in Renaissance states, and of confraternities as key socio-religious interlocutors in the framing of the state and social relationships.
  464. Find this resource:
  465. Polizzotto, Lorenzo. The Elect Nation: The Savonarolan Movement in Florence, 1494–1545. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
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  467. After Savonarola’s execution his followers turned to confraternities to fulfill his mission of religious reform and charitable outreach. Confraternities allowed a high degree of activism, socialization, and organization, and they constituted a large Savonarolan underground that emerged ready to take power in the last republic.
  468. Find this resource:
  469. Terpstra, Nicholas. Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion in Renaissance Bologna. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
  470. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511523502Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  471. Traces the evolution of confraternities and their role in Bolognese politics and social life under the Bentivoglio signory and into the period of senatorial oligarchy and Catholic reform. Particular attention is paid to their internal organization, characteristic devotions, and participation in public cults and charitable institutions.
  472. Find this resource:
  473. Trio, Paul. Volksreligie als spiegel van een stedelijke samenleving: De broederschappen te Gent in de late middeleeuwen. Symbolae Facultatis Litterarum et Philosophiae Lovaniensis, Ser. B 11. Leuven, Belgium: Universitaire Pers Leuven, 1993.
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  475. A critical discussion by a leading historian of how the brotherhoods, guilds, and chambers of rhetoric that emerge and expand through the late middle ages in Ghent express together a coherent vision of lay religion with a civic focus and communal purpose.
  476. Find this resource:
  477. Cross-Cultural Dynamics
  478.  
  479. Confraternities constituted social forms that could enable communities to preserve distinctive identities and practices that were under challenge or threat. Lennon 2006 and Mulvey 1980 show that within quite distinct colonial contexts, confraternities might be introduced by colonizing powers as vehicles for acculturation but could in fact become forms that preserved differences and enabled resistance.
  480.  
  481. Lennon, Colm. “The Confraternities and the Cultural Duality in Ireland, 1450–1550.” In Early Modern Confraternities in Europe and the Americas: International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Edited by Christopher Black and Pamela Gravestock, 34–52. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006.
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  483. Fraternities developed differently in the Gaelic Irish and the English communities of Ireland, and this study sets their institutional differences into the local political, cultural, and ecclesiastical contexts. Fraternities helped frame and sustain ethnic-communal differences, and these divergences help explain later responses to the Protestant Reformation in Ireland.
  484. Find this resource:
  485. Mulvey, Patricia A. “Black Brothers and Sisters: Membership in the Black Lay Brotherhoods of Colonial Brazil.” Luso-Brazilian Review 17.2 (1980): 253–279.
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  487. After initially aiming to gather members of different backgrounds into single brotherhoods, Dominicans and Jesuits began promoting racially distinct groups and black confraternities in particular. These became vehicles for maintaining in syncretized form West African and pre-Columbian religious and political practices.
  488. Find this resource:
  489. Rural Confraternities and Local Religion
  490.  
  491. French historians first raised the question of whether medieval rural populations could be considered “Christian” in any meaningful way, and this triggered a series of studies in the 1970s and 1980s on the forms and priorities of religion in rural areas. It was clear that nonclerical collective forms of expression would be central to this debate, and so confraternities became important to the efforts in Galpern 1976, Hoffman 1984, and Christian 1989 to take the measure of what was alternately called “the religions of the people” or “local religion.” Luria 1991 and Torre 2000 argued against a conflict model and aimed to show instead how rural laity employed Catholic forms creatively in an effort to negotiate with powers on earth and heaven. In a similar vein, Bainbridge 1996, Crouch 2000, and Burdzy 2004 caution that rural and urban realities may not be quite as distinct as they are often made out to be.
  492.  
  493. Bainbridge, Virginia R. Gilds in the Medieval Countryside: Social and Religious Change in Cambridgeshire, c. 1350–1558. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1996.
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  495. Compares urban and rural guilds from their emergence until suppression, showing how they reflected local social hierarchies, exercised social control, promoted mutual charitable assistance, and fostered economic development—while also demonstrating changes in lay devotional life. Bainbridge uses a 1388–1389 survey, tax records, wills, letters, and administrative records.
  496. Find this resource:
  497. Burdzy, Dominika. “Religious Confraternities in a Polish Town: The Case of Sandomierz from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries.” Confraternitas 15.2 (2004): 10–40.
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  499. Networks generated by religious orders, chiefly the Franciscans and Jesuits, helped make confraternities vehicles for extensive connections both between this major city and Krakow, and between the town and its rural hinterland. Confraternities thereby fostered a vibrant local religion that was nonetheless strongly connected to broader Catholic devotional movements and disciplines.
  500. Find this resource:
  501. Christian, William A. Local Religion in Sixteenth Century Spain. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989.
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  503. A classic anthropological study of the interactions between rural laity and clergy and the resulting creation of a form of religion that is neither clearly orthodox nor heterodox but is framed as a conjunction of local concerns with the spiritual forms and resources of Catholicism.
  504. Find this resource:
  505. Crouch, David J. F. Piety, Fraternity, and Power: Religious Gilds in Late Medieval Yorkshire, 1389–1547. Woodbridge, UK: York Medieval, 2000.
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  507. A study of sociopolitical dynamics both in rural and urban (Corpus Christi gild of York and St. Mary of Hull) gilds, with attention to membership patterns, spiritual exercises, officeholding, and legacies, from the gild returns census of 1389 to the period of the Reformation.
  508. Find this resource:
  509. Galpern, A. N. Religions of the People in Sixteenth-Century Champagne. Harvard Historical Studies 92. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976.
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  511. An early and spirited counter to the thesis of Jean Delumeau and others: that premodern French rural areas were only superficially Christian. Galpern makes confraternal piety a key point in his argument, which works more with urban than rural evidence.
  512. Find this resource:
  513. Hoffman, Philip T. Church and Community in the Diocese of Lyon, 1500–1789. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984.
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  515. Compares urban and rural Catholicism through and beyond the Reformation, finding that urban elites cooperated with clergy in framing more-disciplined practices around groups such as Holy Sacrament confraternities, while rural populations experienced less agency and more alienation as discipline depleted popular rituals and exacerbated social control.
  516. Find this resource:
  517. Luria, Keith P. Territories of Grace: Cultural Change in the Seventeenth-Century Diocese of Grenoble. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
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  519. Rural villagers constructed their religious life by adopting and adapting the liturgical forms, institutional structures, and doctrinal beliefs of “official” Catholicism. Reducing the resulting tensions with a Counter-Reformation bishop to a conflict of high versus low culture oversimplifies a complicated process of compromise between competing orthodoxies.
  520. Find this resource:
  521. Torre, Angelo. “Faith’s Boundaries: Ritual and Territory in Rural Piedmont in the Early Modern Period.” In The Politics of Ritual Kinship: Confraternities and Social Order in Early Modern Italy. Edited by Nicholas Terpstra, 243–261. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
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  523. Expands Torre’s earlier work on the “devotional consumption” of the baroque period to show how periodic rituals and festivities established the geographical and human boundaries of community. Also shows how, particularly after Trent, confraternities became critical players in intense struggles to protect the political and ecclesiastical prerogatives of overlapping “localities.”
  524. Find this resource:
  525. Urban Dynamics
  526.  
  527. Confraternities were among the major collective forms communities used to order their social life, and it is not surprising that these communities grew in number and membership in tandem with the growth of towns and cities. Fanti 2001 offers a series of independent studies focused on particular groups. But Eckstein 1995, Farnhill 2001, Rosser 1989, and Simiz 2002 all take a morphological approach that aims to locate brotherhoods in the broader contexts of urban sociology. Weissman 1982 is an ambitious study that deliberately sets religion to one side, but its conclusions are driven by the demands of the sociological model applied, while Garrioch 2004 takes an approach that confirms the importance of religious belief as a marker of group identity, activity, and social relations.
  528.  
  529. Eckstein, Nicholas. The District of the Green Dragon: Neighbourhood Life and Social Change in Renaissance Florence. Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1995.
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  531. Finely detailed study of confraternities as key agencies of neighborhood sociability, charity, and local government. Examines how they shaped social life and formed local authority structures that oversaw parish life in the early 15th century and how this eroded as the Medici concentrated power.
  532. Find this resource:
  533. Fanti, Mario. Confraternite e città a Bologna nel medioevo e nell’età moderna. Rome: Herder Editrice, 2001.
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  535. A series of institutional studies offering detailed archival explorations of the origins and development of the leading confraternities in Bologna. Each essay deals with a particular confraternity and includes discussion of evolving membership, charitable activities, and cultural patronage.
  536. Find this resource:
  537. Farnhill, Keith. Guilds and the Parish Community in Late Medieval East Anglia, c. 1470–1550. Woodbridge, UK: York Medieval, 2001.
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  539. Arguing that we should not see guilds as purely or largely religious bodies, Farnhill offers a detailed examination of their social, economic, political, and religious roles. Focuses specifically on guild membership (by number, class, and gender), the reasons for their guilds’ popularity, their relations to parish authorities and life, and their fate under Henry VIII’s Reformation.
  540. Find this resource:
  541. Garrioch, David. “Lay-Religious Associations, Urban Identities, and Urban Space in Eighteenth-Century Milan.” Journal of Religious History 28.1 (2004): 35–49.
  542. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9809.2004.00204.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  543. Religious associations provided social, political, and neighborhood cohesion in 18th-century Milan. Their activities reflect the operation of unofficial hierarchies; the overlapping of family, occupational, and parish identities; and the tensions between elite forms of religious practice and persisting forms of local religion at the urban neighborhood level.
  544. Find this resource:
  545. Rosser, Gervase. Medieval Westminster 1200–1540. Oxford: Clarendon, 1989.
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  547. A model urban study that clarifies the sociological and spiritual functions of lay guilds as expressions of lay religious life, upper-class sociability, parochial administration, and institutional charity, particularly as they multiplied markedly through the later 15th and early 16th centuries.
  548. Find this resource:
  549. Simiz, Stefano. Confréries urbaines et dévotion en Champagne (1450–1830). Villeneuve-d’Ascq, France: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2002.
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  551. Tracks late medieval flowering, 16th-century latency, and baroque reflowering of groups in three major cities, offering a census of groups, charts of activities, and extensive maps that plot the development of artisanal groups of religious sociability into bourgeois institutions organizing ritual and charitable life.
  552. Find this resource:
  553. Weissman, Ronald F. E. Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence. New York: Academic Press, 1982.
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  555. An application of the Chicago school of symbolic interactionist sociology to Florentine confraternities. Aims to see how social and psychological contexts of suspicion, anxiety, and conflict in kin and neighborhood life led men to seek less agonistic brotherhood in confraternities and determined the evolution of their spiritual exercises and corporate life.
  556. Find this resource:
  557. Sociability
  558.  
  559. Confraternities’ collective life went beyond a series of social and devotional functions, and perhaps one of the key lessons that they provide is the realization that sociability was a key factor advancing the kind of group cohesion that allowed them to play broader roles in their communities. Rosser 1994 emphasizes the importance of the annual feast in bridging community and hierarchy, while Barnes 1994 expands this to a broader range of devotional activities. Mulvey 1982 and Germeten 2006 note that confraternities were imposed in colonial contexts by political and religious authorities as a means of advancing the acculturation of subordinate groups, but they come to opposite conclusions about the eventual effect of this move.
  560.  
  561. Barnes, Andrew. The Social Dimension of Piety: Associative Life and Devotional Change in the Penitent Confraternities of Marseilles, 1499–1792. New York: Paulist Press, 1994.
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  563. Focusing on membership patterns, collective life, officeholding, dispute resolution, and shifting devotions, Barnes offers a sophisticated sociological analysis of Marseille’s penitential confraternities and how their internal dynamics shift as devotions move from collective to the more individualized forms of “Baroque piety” after the 16th century.
  564. Find this resource:
  565. Germeten, Nicole von. Black Blood Brothers: Confraternities and Social Mobility for Afro-Mexicans. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2006.
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  567. Confraternities functioned initially as vehicles of resistance in the colonial context, which allowed a distinct role for women. But over the course of the 17th century they developed into institutions promoting the acculturation of Africans into Spanish and baroque Catholic forms of social organization and worship.
  568. Find this resource:
  569. Mulvey, Patricia A. “Slave Confraternities in Brazil: Their Role in Colonial Society.” The Americas 39.1 (July 1982): 39–68.
  570. DOI: 10.2307/981269Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  571. African and mestizo confraternities exercised limited legal powers within their communities. They sometimes challenged colonial authorities by bringing cruel slave owners to court and lending members money in order to buy their freedom.
  572. Find this resource:
  573. Rosser, Gervase. “Going to the Fraternity Feast: Commensality and Social Relations in Late Medieval England.” Journal of British Studies 33.4 (October 1994): 430–446.
  574. DOI: 10.1086/386064Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  575. There may have been as many as 30,000 fraternities in 15th-century England. While overtly religious activities were significant, their annual patronal feasts were examples of “social politics in action,” where spiritual community and social hierarchy mixed in a costly celebration that promoted common purpose.
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