- Fathers and Godfathers: Spiritual Kinship in Early-Modern Italy by Guido Alfani
Although the introduction of this book sets out a sweeping plan to survey developments in godparenthood from ancient to modern times and from Europe to the Americas, the crux of Guido Alfani’s work addresses the previously under-studied developments in Catholic ideas and practices related to godparenthood in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In particular, Alfani is interested in tracing the impact of Tridentine decrees on northern Italian parishes in the late 1600s and early 1700s. In this specific endeavor, he makes a valuable contribution to discussions about early modern godparenthood and the transmission of the Catholic Reformation.
Alfani, an economic historian, has produced a largely quantitative study based on data from northern Italian diocesan and parish baptismal registries, including those of Ivrea, Vicenza, Voghera, and Turin. His initial overview of pre-Reformation practices emphasizes the fact that before the conclusion of the Council of Trent (1563), Catholic practices varied greatly from including one or two godfathers in a baptismal ceremony to including a crowd of godparents. Alfani then moves to the heart of his discussion when he delves into the Tridentine debates about limiting the number of godparents to be allowed at a baptismal ceremony. Initially these debates included, for example, concerns about ensuring that godparents were suitably prepared to serve as Christian educators for their godchildren. [End Page 367] Ultimately, however, the Tridentine decree regarding godparents addressed only numbers—reducing the acceptable number to one or possibly to one godfather and one godmother—so as to minimize the complications that had previously resulted from establishing too many relationships of spiritual kinship (and thus too many marriage restrictions). Alfani’s data show clearly that, in his northern Italian localities, this Tridentine decree was in fact put into practice—sometimes abruptly, sometimes over several decades—as reflected in the decreasing number of godparents recorded in the baptismal registries.
One crucial contribution is Alfani’s discussion of this process, in which he uses pastoral visitation records to demonstrate the gradual and limited nature of the process. As he shows, the parish visitors initially just wanted to ensure that local priests knew the correct process; only later did they tend to ask specific questions about whether the practice of including fewer godparents had actually been adopted. Alfani notes that priests’ answers sometimes were vague and, putting these examples together with his registry data, argues that this indicates local resistance to the full implementation of Tridentine reforms.
Alfani’s most significant conclusion is that, although Trent succeeded in reducing the number of godparents in northern Italy, such an effort had the unintended consequence of increasing parents’ focus on using that godparental relationship to establish “vertical” social relationships with socioeconomic superiors. He finds, for example, that before Trent, it was not uncommon to ask clergy to serve as godparents; with the limit of one godparent, however, clergy were no longer desirable godparents, presumably because they did not offer the promise of significant socioeconomic assistance or benefit. Also, although the book title focuses on godfathers, Alfani emphasizes in his discussion that another result of Trent was an increase in the presence of godmothers as the only officially acceptable way to give a child more than one godparent.
Ultimately, Alfani’s work presents a concrete, deeply researched set of data and conclusions about a particular region that will allow for fruitful comparative work in the future.
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