The Boys of the Archangel Raphael. A Youth Confraternity in Florence, 1411-1785 (review)

152 Reviews house is too narrow' and with the exclusiveness of the 'men's hall'. Both these larger themes are, it is stressed, concerned to stress the (re-)establishment of order and the value or limitations ofritualspace, the last encapsulated in the opposed notions of 'the hall' (oddly churchlike) as opposed to 'the huf. The last is characterised as 'a space containing w o m e n , kinship, fertility, sex, agriculture, food, sleep and night . . . an earthen place, suited to our earthen natures, male and female' (p. 119), whereas the hall is to be seen as 'regressive'. The latter part of the study is concerned with psychoanalytic matters including: the degree of (Aristotelian) identification with the hero; the degree of relinquishment/cure possible for the audience/reader; the Augustine-like analysis of the soul being assisted by our reading of Freud, Gilson and Ricoeur; and the ethics of civilization (p. 166)—deemed to be explored or probed by the Beowulf poet The conclusion to his study is both a personal confession of resentful attitudes to authority and Earl's satisfaction at the hero's freedom, the latter being seen as that of the epic poet himself. Further, it is the speculative critic's perceptive concluding notion that 'the poem invites a mediation on the unconscious themes of our o w n individual and cultural origins' (p. 188). While the first half of the text considers very freshly such concepts as space, time, history and orality, the second is informed by psychoanalytic anthropology and by all creative notions of heroic autonomy. 'Provocative', 'challenging' and 'reflective' are more appropriate epithets to describe this theoretical study than when they are applied to other interpretations of this now, perhaps, less enigmatic and most perdurable of Old English poems. J. S. Ryan School of English, Communication and Theatre University of N e w England Eisenbichler, Konrad, The Boys of the Archangel Raphael. A Youth Confrater in Florence, 1411-1785, Toronto, Toronto University Press, 1998; cloth; pp. xi, 474; 8 plates. R.R.P. $US55.00. Over the last twenty-five years lay religious confraternities of the late medieval and Early Modern period have become one of the most fertile and innovative fields of historical research. Until the early 1970s, despite being one of the most ubiquitous forms of association in western Christendom, confraternities were neglected even by those historians w h o ransacked confraternal archives for evidence of the artistic, literary and musical works they commissioned and produced. M u c h of the credit for their revaluation must be given to anglophone historians w h o were first to realise the social and political importance of confraternities. Since then, a number of major monographs and numerous shorter studies have appeared. Few aspects of Reviews 153 confraternal life have remained unexplored. Our knowledge of confraternities has expanded prodigiously and with it the knowledge of the societies in which they operated. Prof. Konrad Eisenbichler has been at the forefront of this process of revaluation, pioneering archival research in Florentine youth confraternities. For more thanfifteenyears he has published numerous seminal studies in the field. H e has organised sessions on various aspects of confraternal life at international conferences in both North America and Italy. H e has founded a journal, Confraternitas, and a library, at Victoria University within the University of Toronto, wholly dedicated to confraternal studies. H e has acted as adviser, archival informant and mentor to countless post-graduate students and colleagues grappling with problems posed by their research on confraternities. H e has become, in short, the acknowledged international expert on all matters connected with Florentine confraternities in general and youth confraternities in particular. The expertise and unrivalled knowledge acquired in these years are much in evidence in the book under review. The Boys of the Archangel Raphael has many features which render it invaluable to scholars. It is the first full-length study devoted to a youth confraternity. It is to m y knowledge the only scholarly work analysing a confraternity, regardless of type, for the whole period of its existence. It is the first truly multi-disciplinary study of a confraternity to have appeared. Furthermore, unlike previous historians of Florentine youth confraternities...