Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion in Renaissance Bologna

by Nicholas Terpstra

• ISBN13: 9780521522618
• ISBN10: 0521522617
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-08-08
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This book analyses the social, political and religious roles of the confraternities - the lay groups through which Italians of the Renaissance expressed their individual and collective religious beliefs - in Bologna in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. These confraternities shaped the civic religious cult through charitable activities, public shrines and processions. This civic religious role expanded as the confraternities became politicised: patricians used the confraternities increasingly in order to control the civic religious cult, civic charity, and the city itself. The book examines in detail how confraternities initially provided laypeople of the artisanal and merchant classes with a means of expressing a religious life separate from, but not in opposition to, the local parish or mendicant house. By the mid-sixteenth century, artisans and merchants had few options beyond parochial confraternities which were controlled by parish priests.

Table of Contents

List of figures	xi
List of tables	xii
Acknowledgments	xiii
Preface	xv
Prologue	1	(13)
The early quattrocento: confraternities, observance movements, and the civic cult	14	(24)
Lay spirituality and confraternal worship	38	(45)
Confraternal and mendicant brotherhood	39	(10)
Collective devotions	49	(16)
Private devotions	65	(3)
Death and dying	68	(15)
The mechanics of membership	83	(51)
Novitiate and profession	84	(9)
Social geography and social standing	93	(5)
Size, growth, and attendance	98	(10)
Expulsion	108	(4)
Retention	112	(4)
Women	116	(16)
Summary	132	(2)
Communal identity, administration, and finances	134	(37)
Community	134	(10)
Administration	144	(7)
Income, property, and obligations	151	(20)
Confraternal charity and the civic cult in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries	171	(46)
From signorial to senatorial oligarchy	172	(7)
From confraternal ospedali to civic poor relief	179	(26)
Developing the civic cult	205	(12)
Epilogue	217	(9)
Bibliography	226	(20)
Index	246