Civic Christianity in Renaissance Italy: The Hospital of Treviso, 1400–1530 (review)

David M. D’Andrea’s impressive new book is a study of the Trevisan confraternity of Santa Maria dei Battuti. He traces the confraternity’s importance for the material and spiritual well-being of the city, but also sees it as an important element in Treviso’s civic religion—its fundamentally religious sense of its civic identity. Indeed, the most remarkable sections of his work use the confraternity as a key to understanding the complex relationship between Treviso and Venice.

Santa Maria dei Battuti was the city’s preeminent lay religious organization, attracting members, donations, and the support of both church and commune. The confraternity was a devotional family: “brothers” and “sisters” were to live according to a code that fostered piety, were obliged to aid weaker members, and were required to remember the departed with funerals and Masses. The various charitable services that this family provided to the broader community are traced in two fascinating chapters. Its complex of buildings lay at the center of a network of giving that benefited some of the most vulnerable groups in Treviso: widows, foundlings, pilgrims, prisoners, and debtors. It also was the site of a large hospital that provided the poor with medical treatment, aided by the proximity of the medical school in Padua and the spice markets of Venice.

D’Andrea suggests that after Treviso yielded its independence to Venice in 1344, the confraternity, at the center of public life, became even more important as a symbol of civic pride. Here was an institution whose liberties recalled the city’s vanished independence; here was a locus of power for a ruling class deprived of sovereignty; here was the source and the sign of divine favor. This “mini-commune” played an important role as a mediator between subject city and dominant city. A particularly fascinating section treats civic processions. These were rituals in which the confraternity “act[ed]” the “self-assertion” of the subject city but in cooperation with the dominant city: Venice defended the primacy of the Battuti in the processional life of Treviso while the confraternity processed in honor of ducal elections and military victories. The author elegantly uses the processional banner of the confraternity to embody its role as mediator between the universal and the local, between center and periphery: The Virgin Mary appeared on both sides, accompanied on one side by Ss. Peter and Paul and on the other side by St. Mark (the patron saint of Venice) and St. Liberale (the patron saint of Treviso).

D’Andrea’s analysis of the political importance of the confraternity reflects scholarship on the early-modern state that emphasizes the balance of cooperation and conflict that existed between center and periphery. Trevisans saw the confraternity as an embodiment of their city’s independent identity within the state while Venetians saw the good governance and the good works of the confraternity as a source of stability and divine favor for the state. It is the wedding of disparate themes—religious association and social welfare to state politics—which makes this book a fascinating contribution to confraternity studies.