Italian scholarship on pre-modern confraternities in Italy.

The last fifteen to twenty years have witnessed a phenomenal growth in the study of medieval and Renaissance confraternities, those lay religious associations that pervaded the spiritual and social fabric of pre-modern European society. In English-language scholarship, the field was first surveyed by three historians who firmly left their mark on this fertile soil: Brian Pullan examined the place of the Venetian scuole (as local confraternities were called) in the social fabric of the state; Rab Hatfield investigated the social and political influence of the Florentine confraternity of the Magi; and Richard Trexler probed the place of confraternities for youths in Florentine civic ritual.(1) The field was not, however, tilled in depth until Ronald F.E. Weissman labored in the Florentine archives for his 1981 book on "ritual brotherhood," a concept and an effort that have since become a basic frame of reference for much of English-language scholarship on the history of confraternities in pre-modern times. In the years that followed, a number of English-speaking scholars have produced a bountiful harvest of books and articles too numerous to mention.(2)

In Italy, interest in lay religious associations has deeper roots.(3) A historical survey of the confraternal movement was first carried out by the eighteenth-century savant Ludovico Antonio Muratori. In his Dissertation 75, "De piis laicorum dissertationes" (1742), Muratori noted the abuses that plagued the confraternities of his time and earnestly wished for their reformation. By the end of the century, in the wake of wide-ranging suppressions at the hand of governments in Tuscany, Lombardy, and elsewhere, the Florentine scholar Lorenzo Mehus took a harsher stand in his Dell'origine, progresso, abusi, e riforma delle confraternite laicali (1785), unmercifully exposing abuses (real and imagined), and shamelessly praising Grand Duke Peter Leopold for his "enlightened" general closure of these "decayed" organizations. With their silence about and general disinterest for confraternities, Italian Risorgimento and post-unification scholars ensured the longevity of Muratori's and Mehus's severe criticisms of lay religious organizations and contributed to the marginalization of the pre-modern confraternal movement as an area of scholarly research.

After a century and a half of near-total neglect, the first major work on confraternities to appear since the eighteenth century was Gennaro Maria Monti's Le confraternite medievali nell'alta e media Italia (1927). This two-volume work had its weaknesses; it was, for one, a fairly cursory description of a variety of confraternities, with far too few footnote references and far too many factual errors. Nonetheless, it remains to this day the only work by an Italian scholar to examine the phenomenon at a quasi-peninsular level (I use the word "quasi" intentionally because in his survey Monti completely ignored southern Italy).(4) In spite of its weaknesses, however, Monti's study still offers a number of valuable insights that merit further examination.

The second modern scholar to cast a wide net over Italian confraternities was the Dominican Fr. Gilles Gerard Meersseman, whose three-volume set of collected essays on the confraternities affiliated with his order, Ordo fraternitatis (1977), immediately became a fundamental text for anyone working on Italian lay religious associations.(5) Meersseman was instrumental in establishing a scholarly methodology firmly based on archival research and keenly aware of questions of terminology. His own work also revealed the extensive implications, both social and religious, of medieval and Renaissance confraternities.

Meersseman's focus on confraternities associated with the Dominican order reveals a characteristic of all Italian scholarship on confraternities after Monti - the institutional nature of such research, focusing either on a specific confraternity, city, or diocese. On the whole, such scholarship has been carried out by local historians who have disseminated their research through local agencies such as the area's particular Cassa di Risparmio, its pro loco or Storia patria association, or through small publishing houses specializing in local history. As a result, much fascinating work by Italian historians has not reached the wider scholarly community, especially outside Italy. One of the observations made by several scholars at the conference on "Ritual and Recreation in Renaissance Confraternities" (28-30 April 1989, Toronto, Canada) was that little Italian scholarship on confraternities actually crossed the Atlantic (or, some Italian scholars added, the Appennines, for that matter!). This is unfortunate, for there is much being done at the local level that merits closer attention and wider dissemination.

The first and, for some time, the leading Italian equipe working on the confraternal movement was established and located in Perugia. It was headed by Fr. Ugolino Nicolini, a Franciscan who sought to foster top-level scholarship on lay piety in Umbria. Its international conferences on the flagellant movement produced two sizeable and excellent collections of articles on the movement and the confraternities that were touched by or arose from it - Il movimento dei disciplinati (1962, rpt. 1986) and Risultati e prospettive di ricerca sul movimento dei disciplinati (1972). It also gave birth to the "Centro di documentazione sul movimento dei disciplinati" that published a journal (Quaderni del Centro di Documentazione sul Movimento dei Disciplinati, vol. 1, 1965), supported several publications, and fostered a number of promising scholars.(6) Two of the most eminent scholars associated with the Perugia center are Olga Marinelli, now retired, whose volume Le confraternite di Perugia dalle origini al sec. XIX. Bibliografia delle opere a stampa (1965) is an indispensable bibliographic tool; and the energetic Giovanna Casagrande, whose work on the individual and collective penitential religiosity of the laity (both men and women) in late-medieval/early-Renaissance Umbria merits careful consideration.(7) Fr. Nicolini's death a few years ago, unfortunately left a leadership vacuum that has brought the work of the Centro to a standstill (which one hopes will be merely temporary).

In the early 1980s a second center dedicated to research into confraternities was established, this time in southern Italy, an area whose lay religious organizations had been completely ignored by Monti and quite neglected by both Italian and foreign scholars. Under the direction of Professor Giovanni Pinto, the "Centro Ricerche di Storia Religiosa in Puglia" has gathered together a sizeable group of local historians especially dedicated to identifying, examining, and preserving their rich confraternal heritage. Their concerted effort has uncovered a wealth of material, but unfortunately for Renaissance scholars the vast majority of the surviving documentation and artwork is post-Tridentine. The little sixteenth-seventeenth century material that has been identified is fragmentary at best. The equipe's effort, nonetheless, is highly commendable, for in the years the Centro has been operative it has produced a number of volumes, some dedicated entirely to a specific church or diocese in Puglia, others offering instead a wide range of articles on confraternities in the region and throughout Italy.(8) One of the hallmarks of its publications series is the rich visual content of each volume, much of it in color, presenting not only paintings, frescoes, and sculptures, but also churches, oratories, architectural details, liturgical objects, and confraternal vestments. In a departure that is very much welcomed for the level of national and international outreach it exemplifies, the Centro's most recent collection of articles, edited by Liana Bertoldi Lenoci and simply titled Confraternite, chiesa e societa (1994), gathers not only local historians, but also scholars from other parts of Italy, Europe and even North America, to examine confraternities from a variety of points of view and academic disciplines. In its interdisciplinarity, eclecticism, and inclusivity, this volume offers a multi-faceted and multi-layered view of current scholarship on Italian confraternities. It does not have a thesis to advance, but that is not what one expects from such collections; on the contrary, one is pleased to encounter such a variety of current research by scholars from different academic traditions.

Perugia and Bari are exceptional cases. Other cities and regions have not enjoyed the benefit of research centers comparable to those of professors Nicolini and Pinto. Some, however, do have small groups of scholars who gravitate around a doyen interested in lay religious organizations. Such is the case in Lombardy, for example, with Danilo Zardin, the Veneto with Giuseppina De Sandre Gasparini, Piedmont with Angelo Torre, or Liguria with Edoardo Grendi and Fausta Franchini Guelfi. Each of these persons has a long and distinguished record in confraternity studies, and has attracted younger scholars to write theses and short monographs on his/her area's lay religious associations. Although sometimes verging on antiquarian interests or limited by a sense of doing local history for local consumption, these studies reveal a wide range of approaches and provide much useful information.

The history of Lombard confraternities has benefited immensely from the thorough work of Danilo Zardin. His research on two confraternities in the small Lombard pieve of Parabiago-Legnano is solidly based on documents from a variety of archives (state, episcopal, and parish) and reveals how in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries confraternities, though engaged in "traditional" activities (devotion, piety, education), were becoming much more closely tied to the local parish and coming under the control of the local parish priest (Zardin, 1981). His subsequent volume, San Carlo Borromeo ed il rinnovamento della vita religiosa dei laici (1982), pursues this observation further with an examination of St. Charles Borromeo's role in the renewal of two Milanese confraternities. The Borromean influence is further examined by Marina Olivieri Baldissarri in a study of the Milanese confraternity of the Holy Cross, whose particular work of charity consisted in assisting prisoners (1985). One of her observations is that members joined the organization not only in order to advance their spiritual life, but also in order to reap material benefits - a cynical view, perhaps, but certainly one that is valid in the case of many other pre-modern confraternities throughout Italy and even Europe.

Confraternities in the Veneto have also attracted the attention of historians interested in the social role of lay piety. Giuseppina De Sandre Gasperini's 1974 edition of confraternity statutes in Padua is firmly in line with the extensive effort spearheaded by scholars such as Nicolini, Meersseman, and others, to publish these fundamental prescriptive documents. Although the publication of statutes is highly commendable, one sometimes wishes that, alongside the effort to bring to light these "prescriptive" documents, there was also a concerted effort to do the same for "descriptive" documents, that is, for the memoirs and the account books that reveal what was rather than what was supposed to be the daily life of the confraternity. De Sandre Gasperini's subsequent monograph on the town of Villa del Bosco (1980, 1987), offers an insight into the actual life of a confraternity by illustrating how the influence of a near-by Benedictine monastery, the agrarian nature (and collapse) of the territory, long-term demographic trends, the vicissitudes of the local clergy, and the founding of a confraternity, are all firmly intertwined in the context of a small fifteenth-century town in the Veneto. More recently, Gian Piero Pacini, who in earlier times worked closely with Gilles Gerard Meersseman, has published a fascinating study of the confraternity of the Blessed Virgin of the Gonfalone in Vicenza (1994). His work illustrates clearly the complex connections between the confraternity, the local ecclesiastical authorities, the town's political leadership, and the Catholic reform movement in sixteenth-century Veneto.

Two scholars have been at the forefront of research on Ligurian confraternities: Edoardo Grendi and Fausta Franchini Guelfi. As early as 1965 Edoardo Grendi was opening the field to a discussion of the morphology and dynamics of confraternities; subsequently, both he and his student Rodolfo Savelli published several important articles on the manner in which confraternities organized and distributed charity (Grendi, 1965; 1975; 1982; and Savelli, 1984). One eagerly awaits from either scholar a book-length study of the history of Genoese confraternities and their political and social connections.

On the art-historical side, Fausta Franchini Guelfi has been at the forefront in the examination of the rich artistic heritage of local confraternities, the casacce. Her two-volume set, La Liguria delle Casacce. Devozione, arte, storia delle confraternite liguri (c.1982) consists of informative articles by a number of local historians and a beautifully illustrated and well documented exhibition catalogue. The articles in the first volume sketch out not only the history of Ligurian confraternities (Edoardo Grendi), but also their ambivalent position as subjects of both the Senate of the Genoese Republic and the Church (Luigi Alfonso), their relationship with the religious orders (Cassiano Carpaneto Da Langasco), their architecture (Clara Palmas Devoti), their contribution to vernacular theatre (Eugenio Buonaccorsi), their music (Edward Neill), questions of conservation and restoration (Giovanna Rotondi Terminiello), and so forth. One of the most striking elements of Ligurian confraternities is their art, and in particular their enormous and elaborate processional wooden crucifixes. These are currently the subject of a research project headed by Franco Boggero and Fulvio Cervini. A few monographs on specific Ligurian confraternities have also appeared, most slanted towards art history, and, in some cases, colored by personal involvement in the organization - see, for example, Gardella (1990).

The most productive Italian scholar working on Bolognese confraternities is Mario Fanti, whose long list of publications, spanning the last three decades, is fundamental for anyone working on the lay religious life of this city. From an inventory of manuscripts at the Biblioteca Comunale dell'Archiginnasio (1967), through many articles, a monograph on the church and confraternity of the Poveri (1977, 2nd ed. 1983), and proceedings from a conference on institutions of social assistance in Bologna in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (1984), Mario Fanti points to the intimate connection between confraternal devotion and charity. In his La Chiesa e la Compagnia dei Poveri in Bologna (1977), Fanti identified the "ennobling" process (later discussed by Weissman in the case of Florentine confraternities) that is evident in a number of important Bolognese confraternities in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. This same process, Fanti points out, also led to a significant shift in spending patterns away from the confraternity's traditional charitable endeavors and towards the production of magnificent baroque ceremonies. Unfortunately, lacking a teaching appointment at the local university, Mario Fanti has not been able to supervise students directly and thus personally ensure the continuation of his own admirable work. One hopes that other bolognisti will be able to direct students towards the rich field of Bologna la grassa.

One bolognista who has contributed important articles in this area is Adriano Prosperi, whose interests have focussed on the compagnie di giustizia, those confraternities whose specific charitable work was the comforting of criminals condemned to execution (1982). A recent volume by Filippo Fineschi, Cristo e Giuda. Rituali di giustizia a Firenze in eta moderna (1995), has made a fundamental contribution to the study of pre-modern rituals of execution and of the role confraternities played in them. Fineschi thoroughly examines the process of capital punishment in Florence, comparing it to practices in Rome, Naples, Venice, Bologna, London, and Paris. In so doing, he devotes many pages to a description and discussion of the charitable work of the Compagnia dei Neri, Florence's compagnia di giustizia. In a sensitive, yet thoroughly scholarly manner, Fineschi reveals how a condemned criminal was, at one and the same time, both violently separated (by his execution) and charitably reintegrated (by the justice ritual) into society. The inherent contradiction of separating and re-integrating the criminal was rendered even more complex when the criminal was invited, both explicitly and implicitly, to model himself on none other than Christ himself and to offer himself in sacrifice for the spiritual and moral edification of the population.

There is no doyen of confraternity studies to speak of in Tuscany, though Arnaldo D'Addario, for one, could easily have claimed the title had his interest on the history of religion in Florence inclined some of his many students and admirers to pursue further research on the city's lay religious organizations. His masterwork, Aspetti della Controriforma a Firenze (1972), remains the fundamental text for the study of sixteenth-century Florentine religion. Recently, an enormous fest-schrift in honor of his 70th birthday gathered articles on many areas of interest to D'Addario, but contained only two on confraternities; ironically, they were both written by admirers rather than students of his (Borgia, 1994).

Although in recent years a number of Italian historians have published articles on Florentine confraternities, nearly all book-length research on Tuscan lay religious organizations has been carried out, ironically, by foreign scholars. The one exception among Italian fiorentinisti is Ludovica Sebregondi, with two different volumes to her credit (1985, 1991). Though of interest primarily to art historians, her work can also be very informative for other scholars working on Florentine lay associations, for it is solidly grounded in archival documents and subtly colored by her extensive knowledge of the Florentine context. The recent volume co-authored by Luciano Artusi and Antonio Patruno (1994), on the other hand, is to be used with extreme caution - its scholarly apparatus is very limited and it is blissfully ignorant of much recent scholarship, not only foreign, but even Italian.(9) Though it has scholarly pretensions, the volume is in fact geared to popular consumption - as the many irrelevant images and comic-book-type illustrations clearly reveal. Much more trustworthy and useful, instead, is the catalogue for the 1992 exhibition on La Chiesa e la Citta a Firenze nel XV secolo (Rolfi, 1992). The section on confraternities, curated and edited by Ludovica Sebregondi, is of particular interest and importance. Sebregondi also curated and edited the confraternities section for the catalogue accompanying the exhibition mounted for the 1,600th anniversary of the basilica of San Lorenzo (San Lorenzo. I documenti e i tesori nascosti, 1993). The confraternities sections in both these catalogues reflect the thorough and well-informed scholarship that is the hallmark not only of Professor Sebregondi, but of current Florentine research as well.

Other areas of Tuscany have attracted their own historians. As De Sandre Gasperini had done for Villa del Bosco, Ornella Muzzi recently did for San Donato in Poggio (1992). Casting her glance across a far longer chronological span (from the late Middle Ages to the seventeenth century), Muzzi follows the changing role of confraternities in a rural commune in Tuscany from lay religious associations closely intertwined with local communal institutions to post-Tridentine clericalized organizations quite detached from the civic life of their town.

A somewhat similar view is expressed by Angelo Torre in a recent volume on Piedmontese confraternities, Il consumo di devozioni. Religione e comunita nelle campagne dell'Ancien Regime (1995). Focusing on the relationship and tensions inherent between clergy and confraternities, Torre pursues the two thorny questions of "authority" and "legitimacy." His reading of episcopal visitation records leads him to question the usual dichotomy between "official" and "popular" religion. Quite rightly, he points out that confraternities often acted as if they were churches or parishes, offering their members many of the same services provided by the "official" parish. Torre then points out that the grey area between confraternal and parish rituals or services indicates that even after Trent Catholic religious practice was not monolithic - something John O'Malley also argued in a recent Bennett Lecture (Renaissance Society of America meeting, 31 March 1995, New York, N.Y.). Torre's volume thus opens Italian scholarship on confraternities to a subtlety of views that reflects a more sensitive interpretation of the plurality of sixteenth-century (Catholic) religious experience. This sensitivity is evident in the far more critical and interesting questions Torre asks of his material, questions that clearly separate him from the antiquarian interests of earlier scholars. One of his more recent articles has been translated as "Politics Cloaked in Worship: State, Church and Local Power in Piedmont, 1570-1770" (1992); one hopes that his book will also enjoy an English version.

In recent years a number of interdisciplinary conferences organized in Italy on topics closely related to lay religious organizations have opened local confraternity studies to broader historiographical approaches. The proceedings from the two Perugia/Assisi conferences on the flagellant movement have already been mentioned. A seminar on Italian confraternities held in Vicenza in 1979 was subsequently published by Gabriele De Rosa in Ricerche di storia sociale e religiosa, n. 17-18 (1980). Selected papers from the 1982 conference Le confraternite romane. Esperienza religiosa, societa, committenza artistica, edited by Luigi Fiorani (1984), became a fundamental volume in the study of Roman confraternities, for it finally overcame the "magra storiografia sulle confraternite romane" (as Fiorani himself described it) and led not only to an increased interest, but also to a much more diversified approach to the field. Danilo Zardin has been instrumental in this effort to broaden the horizons of local confraternity studies. One of his conferences, which revolved around confraternal and other attempts at poor-relief, was published as La citta e i poveri: Milano e le terre lombarde dal Rinascimento all'eta spagnola (1995). The proceedings from another recent conference, "Corpi, fraternita, mestieri nella storia della societa europea" (Trent, 30 May - 1 June 1996), are being prepared for publication.

Amidst all the research currently underway, there are, however, some lacunae that, one hopes, will soon be filled. For example, it would be useful for the study of Italian confraternities in pre-modern times to include also those areas that are no longer Italian, and especially Corsica, Nice, and Savoy, ceded to France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, or the coasts and islands of Istria and Dalmatia, ceded within living memory to the ex-Yugoslavia. Similarly, there ought to be book-length studies of confraternities for the disenfranchised, especially confraternities for women, Jews, and foreigners. And why not a feminist reading of confraternities?

As this brief survey indicates, Italian scholarship on pre-modern confraternities is flourishing. Individuals and equipes are hard at work in local archives throughout the peninsula. As research moves from the antiquarian interests of previous generations to the broader historiographical and interdisciplinary interests of current Italian historians, a new picture of lay religious experiences and activities in pre-modern Italy is coming into focus. It depicts a world of spiritual, devotional, artistic, social and political interests that were as extensive and interconnected as they were vital to the well-being of the individuals and the community they served.

VICTORIA COLLEGE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO 

1 For these and subsequent bibliographical references to works mentioned in this review, the reader should turn to the bibliography at the end.

2 See the "Publications Received" section in the biannual bulletin Confraternitas for a running bibliography of recent scholarship in this area; see also Eisenbichler, 1994, 289-303. There are four volumes in English currently in press that will be of interest to confraternity studies; see Cole Ahl, Donnelly, Terpstra, and Eisenbichler.

3 In the following review, I will focus fairly exclusively on book-length studies of Italian confraternities published in Italian. This, obviously, will exclude those scholars who have published a number of articles but no monograph on the subject, since neither the space allotted for this review nor the premise on which it is founded would allow me to include these articles. Those who are interested in a longer and more inclusive view may turn to the two, though now slightly dated, Italian summaries by Rusconi, 1987, and Zardin, 1987.

4 The only work to date to examine confraternities throughout the Italian peninsula is Black, 1989, translated into Italian in 1992 (though with some glaring mistranslations; see Sebregondi, 1993, 776).

5 I include Meersseman among Italian scholars because his work was published in Italian and in Italy, and it is both well known and fundamental to Italian scholarship in this area.

6 Among the most noteworthy publications of the center one should note: Settimo centenario della morte di Raniero Fasani, 1984; Nicolini, 1989; and Proietti Pedetta, 1990.

7 See Casagrande, 1995.

8 Among the Centro's collections of essays, see Le confraternite pugliesi in eta moderna, and Le confraternite pugliesi in eta moderna, 2. Among the volumes dedicated to a specific church or diocese see those by Fella, Di Biase, Maci, Latorre, Lisimberti/Todisco, and Rubino.

9 For a review, see Sebregondi, 1995.

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Bertoldi Lenoci, Liana, ed. Confraternite, chiesa e societa. Fasano, 1994.

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Borgia, Luigi et al., ed. Studi in onore di Arnaldo D'Addario. 4 vols. in 5. Lecce, 1994.

Casagrande, Giovanna. Religiosita penitenziale e citta al tempo dei comuni. Bibliotheca Seraphico-Cappucina 48. Rome, 1995.

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