The Politics of Ritual Kinship: Confraternities and Social Order in Early Modern Italy ed. by Nicholas Terpstra (review)

344 LEn-ERS IN CANADA '999 Payne's choice of authors ranges from the familiar to the obscure. Sebastiano Serlio was the first sixteenth-century theorist to commit his ideas to paper and so the second half of the book begins with examination of his work. Gherardo Spini is a more surprising selection. A man of letters without practical building experience, his work had little influence in its time and was only published in 1980. Nonetheless, his text established an important link between the literary and architectural cultures of its time and, especially significant for Payne's argument, he continued the tectonic argument of Alberti's theory where Serlio had adopted the human analogy of Francesco de Giorgio. Words about architecturemore than buildings themselves constitute the material of most chapters. However, when Payne addresses Andrea Palladio, a prolific builder as well as author of possibly the most influential of Renaissance architectural treatises, she devotes considerable attention to his built work. Perhaps not surprisingly, this is the most readable of her chapters. Payne's discussion of the structural expressiveness of Palladio's ornament is particularly insightful. She also notes the increasing linkages to scientific thought in Palladio's work. This finds fuller expression in the writings of Vincenzo Scamozzi at the end of the sixteenth century. Payne ends with a brief discussion of how these currents developed in the course of the seventeenth century. Payne captures the difficulty faced by Renaissance architects struggling to understand the Vitruvian text and in so doing has produced a book that proves challenging to expert and non-expert alike. But the effort is rewarded: Payne provides insights into issues that will appeal to those interested in the visual and literary culture of the Renaissance, as well as architectural theory in general, since the issues that concerned Renaissance architects continue to resonate to the present day. (ANN C. HUPPERT) Nicholas Terpstra, editor. The Politics of Ritual Kinship: Confraternities and Social Order il1 Early Model'll Italy Cambridge University Press. xii, 320. us $69.95 This collection of articles on the role of Early Modem Italian confraternities in politics and society demonstrates the rich diversity of method and ideology to be found in one important sub-field of Early Modem history. As a result, the essays Nicholas Terpstra has gathered and edited address, among other things, the intersectipn of class, gender, and age in the formation and control of confraternities, the increasing use of charity and its employment as a means to legitimize the social status of confraternities, and the changing relationships between confraternities and other organizations such as religious orders, bishops, and civil governments. Giovanna Casagrande in herstudy ofwomen in Umbrian confraternities argues that female membership in confraternities increased from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. As a result of reform within the Catholic church, claustration of nuns especially, women may have found confraternities more attractive than the increaSingly controlled and enclosed lives of tertiaries. Anna Esposito's work on female membership in Roman confraternities also analyses the roles of women and the extent of their presence. She argues that women's participation increased with the growth of external ritual and the emergence of charitable work such as dowering young women and caring for sick women in hospitals. Elliott Horowitz studies the emergence ofJewish confraternities in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ferrara.These were influenced by models from Spain and France as well as by broader trends in ritual kinship in Italy. Politically the tensions between the powerful Norzi family and the confraternity itself indicate competition for power in local communities that parallels that seen on the wider Italian stage. The relationship of confraternities to larger political forces is displayed by Lorenzo Polizzotto, who demonstrates the effect of patronage on the internal operations of the youth confraternity of the Purificationin Florence under Cosimo de' Medici. With the rise of the Medici, the confraternity's statutes and activities came to reflect less a concern for republican virtue than adherence to Medici policies.Nicholas Terpstra demonstrates the role of confraternities as guarantors of the social and political elite through the management of conservatories and orphanages in sixteenth-century Bologna and Florence. These institutions housed upper-class children and trained...