Children of the Promise: The Confraternity of the Purification and the Socialization of Youths in Florence 1427-1785 (review)

Scholarly work on youth confraternities has increased notably in recent years. Lorenzo Polizzotto's Children of the Promise makes a new contribution to this field, telling the story of the Purification, a Florentine confraternity for young men. Using the political history of Florence from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries as a backdrop, Polizzotto discusses the religious and financial activities of the Purification, its relations with Florence's changing forms of government, and its musical and dramatic presentations. While the work is an institutional history, Polizzotto also defines his focus more broadly, as he seeks to "arrive at a closer understanding of the place of adolescents and youths in Florence" (2).

Chapters 1 and 2 concern the foundation of the Purification and its close relations with the Medici in its earliest years. Polizzotto argues that ecclesiastical and secular authorities treated youth confraternities with less suspicion than their adult counterparts, connecting this difference with a developing need within government to control and shape the city's young men. Through its role as a regulator of youth, Polizzotto argues, the Purification was "the means by which the polity could regain its cohesion and strength and thus come into its promised inheritance" (22).

Chapter 3 examines the rise of Savonarola and his interest in using his own associations of youths (fanciulli) to reform Florence, marginalizing groups such as the Purification. But although the Purification was initially opposed to Savonarola, over time the confraternity was taken over by his supporters, as well as by the local Dominican friars of San Marco. Even after the return of the Medici, the Purification remained in the hands of those opposed to the family. Polizzotto effectively uses analysis of the content of the confraternity's sacra rappresentazione on Judith at an early sixteenth-century Carnival to show how the Purification had moved away from loyalty to the Medici to portray itself as resisting tyranny.

The second half of the book examines the various forms the Purification adopted in its last two centuries. Polizzotto argues that by the end of the sixteenth century, the Purification "had reinvented itself" (171), as it became involved in new cultural activities, including the staging of popular plays and musical presentations. Then, in the seventeenth century, the confraternity became a charitable organization, presiding over the foundation of a hospice dedicated to the care of pilgrims and other travelers. Polizzotto argues that in following such a path, the confraternity became a creative, experimental organization in its last century and was only suppressed because the Florentine government sought to place further controls on civic associations.

Despite Polizzotto's stated aim of locating young people within the confraternity, his work concentrates on the institutional history of the Purification. Over the course of the narrative, the focus on the young members of the confraternity is lost amid detailed depictions of (adult) officials' decision-making and political intrigue. Aside from some comments about departing members' donations to the confraternity in the early sixteenth century, for instance, we learn little about the attitudes or responses of youth members to changes to the structure and functions of the Purification. In addition, like many other studies of confraternities, this work deals with gender issues only briefly, despite the potential significance of such questions to the institution's history. For instance, since the Purification was formed to teach the city's young men how to shape themselves (morally and physically) for membership in the polity, some comments on the confraternity's "ideal man" could illuminate concepts of masculinity in the period. Moreover, Polizzotto notes that a century after its foundation, women were gradually given a limited role to play within the Purification, and he also notes that some women began donating alms to it, but he does...