Confraternities were the most common form of organized religious life in medieval and early modern Europe. They were at once the lay face of the church, the spiritual heart of civic government, and the social kin who claimed the allegiance of peers and the obedience of subordinates. In this collection, fifteen scholars examine the development of confraternities in Italy, where they emerged first and had the greatest impact. Individual essays explore a common set of themes across Italy from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries: the ubiquity of confraternities, social construction, and devotional ethos; their ritual culture and civic religion; their antagonistic and collaborative relations with both civic and ecclesiastical authorities; and their role in social welfare and social control of marginal groups. The authors demonstrate how the ritual kinship expressed in confraternities emerged in the Middle Ages and became a powerful force in ‘civilizing’ early modern Italian society.

Résumé
An examination of how lay religious confraternities in Italy shaped early ritual kinship. This 1999 book discusses how sixteenth-century social change and religious reform transformed confraternities, and how these altered groups became key agents in achieving the more rigid social order of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Contenu
List of contributors; Acknowledgements; Introduction: the politics of ritual kinship Nicholas Terpstra; 1. The development of confraternity studies over the past thirty years Christopher F. Black; 2. Homosociality and civic (dis)order in late medieval Italian confraternities Jennifer Fisk Rondeau; 3. Confraternities and lay female religiosity in late medieval and Reniassance Umbria Giovanna Casagrande; 4. The bounds of community: commune, parish, confraternity and charity at the dawn of a new era in Cortona Daniel Bornstein; 5. Men and women in Roman confraternities in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: roles, functions, expectations Anna Esposito; 6. The Medici and the youth Confraternity of the Purification of the Virgin, 1434 1506 Lorenzo Polizzotto; 7. In loco parentis: confraternities and abandoned children in Florence and Bologna Nicholas Terpstra; 8. The first Jesuit confraternities and marginalised groups in sixteenth-century Rome Lance Lazar; 9. Jewish confraternal piety in sixteenth-century Ferrara: continuity and change Elliott Horowitz; 10. The scuole piccole of Venice: formations and transformations Richard S. Mackenney; 11. Relaunching confraternities in the Tridentine era: shaping conscience and Christianising society in Milan and Lombardy Danilo Zardin; 12. The development of Jesuit confraternity activity in the Kingdom of Naples in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Mark A. Lewis; 13. Corpus Domini: ritual metamorphoses and social changes in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Genoa Claudio Bernardi; 14. Faith's boundaries: ritual and territory in rural Piedmont in the early modern period Angelo Torre; 15. The suppression of confraternities in Enlightenment Florence Konrad Eisenbichler; Bibliography; Index.