Table of Contents

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.

Promotional Information

An edited 1999 collection examining the way confraternities shaped society in Renaissance and early modern Italy.

Reviews

'... breathtaking in the range of subjects and timescale considered ... a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarship on Italian confraternities'. William B. Wurthmann, Journal of Ecclesiastical History '... the contributors enrich our understanding of the complex nature of lay charitable and pious activities and identities on the brink of the modern age.' Jennifer D. Selwyn, Archivum Historicum