Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion in Renaissance Bologna.

Nicholas Terpstra. Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion in Renaissance Bologna. (Cambridge Studies in Italian History and Culture.) Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. xx + 251 pp. n.p. ISBN: 0-521-48092-2.

Discussing the state of research on popular piety in 1988, Peter Burke expressed the opinion that "in the cases of France and Italy studies of confraternities . . . are now so numerous that conclusions will soon be subject to the law of diminishing returns (if that has not happened already)" (Catholicism in Early Modern History: a Guide to Research, 1988, 126-27). Terpstra's text brings new data, fresh insight and clarity to the discussion that proves Burke's anxieties premature.

Terpstra maps as his territory "the long-neglected city of Bologna' (xvii). The author deals with the two major categories of devotional confraternities in the city - laudesi and disciplinati - to which he adds the third, hybrid category of the ospedali, which crosses both boundaries. His objectives are those of "recognizing general patterns" as well as "significant variations, and setting the whole in the context of contemporary devotional movements, the city's changing social and political structure, and the expansion of the civic-religious cult" (xviii). As framed by the author, the book has several ambitions, which it handles with commendable dexterity. His study augments previous scholarship on Renaissance confraternities and the ritual city by rethinking and reformulating established paradigms in the Bolognese context.

Terpstra's book is not so much ordered by as overlaid with a chronological narrative, identifying as a key development from the fifteenth to the sixteenth centuries a progressive centralization of power in the city that greatly affected the institutions of lay piety and public charity. This shift resulted in the usurpation of the confraternities by the patriciate from the very artisan class that had made them a powerful social force.

Bracketed by chronology, the core of the book deals lucidly with a broad cross-section of Bolognese confraternities in a discussion of confraternal devotion, the mechanics of membership, and communal identity, finances, and administration. Confraternity statutes provide the fundamental documentation for discussions of the practice of piety within the confraternities, their relationships with mendicant orders, and the functions confraternities played within the lay devotional life of the city. The characteristic Bolognese solution of forming institutional subgroups (the stretta groups) to deal with endemic moves toward reform offers a fascinating case of regional difference in confraternal communities. The section on the mechanics of membership organizes an impressive range of statistics on demographics as well as on initiation, expulsion, and retention practices in the confraternities. A welcome feature of this discussion is the treatment focusing on the involvement of women. In a field which requires comprehensive attention, however, such a treatment is inevitably fragmentary. Women were benefactors and recipients of confraternal benefits and charity, but less frequently were they direct participants; because women's participation in the confraternities is sparsely and irregularly documented, further studies will require new categories of data in order to build on these foundations.

A virtue of Terpstra's book is the flexible viewpoint provided by a structure that regularly alternates between the general and the particular: trends, issues, and questions are projected, posited, defended, and then collapsed at irregular intervals into case studies, embodying generalities in the particulars of specific institutions, individual voices, and temporal events. It extends the boundaries of a resilient regionalism in Italian Renaissance historiography as it addresses the focal issue of lay devotional institutions and their role in the social fabric, in civic imaging and identity. Finally it will be of interest to scholars concerned with the fashioning of a ritual life: that is, how groups of people lived, prayed, and prepared for death within a Renaissance city.

RANDI KLEBANOFF Carleton University