Working in the Vineyard of the Lord: Jesuit Confraternities in Early Modern Italy (review)

The study of confraternities and sodalities is a deeply furrowed field in European history. With foundational studies by Louis Châtellier and Christopher Black, and more specialized studies of Nicholas Terpstra, Brian Pullan, Richard Trexler, Edward Muir, and Ronald Weissman, one wonders whether another work on such institutions is necessary, but this solid, informative work by Lance Gabriel Lazar manages to be a welcome contribution to the increasing studies of civic ritual and early modern “confessionalization” (confessionalisierung). Although he focuses on Jesuit confraternities like many other researchers, Lazar studies the Jesuits’ earliest confraternities rather than the Marian congregations and sodalities of the later Society. This approach allows him to demonstrate precisely how the earliest Jesuit approaches to poor relief and social ministry depended upon and deviated from the earlier practices of mendicant friars, but also how they differed from the congregations for which they later became famous.

Working in the Vineyard is divided into five chapters. The first provides a general historical and methodological overview of poor relief in Rome and a telescopic overview of the entire work. The second chapter turns to the House of St. Martha (Casa di S. Marta), a pioneering halfway house for prostitutes and battered women, and its accompanying confraternity, the Company of Grace (Compagnia della Grazie). This chapter is especially good when Lazar outlines the attempts of Roman Catholic apologists to clean up the city’s reputation after what other scholars have called “the golden age of prostitution” during the pontificates of Julius II and Leo X. Not surprisingly, Lazar follows this chapter with a study of the expansion of the Jesuits’ mission to daughters of prostitutes and poverty-stricken girls in the conservatory and confraternity of St. Catherine of the Poor Virgins (S. Caterina delle Vergini Miserabili). The fourth chapter, which I found especially eye-opening, detailed the House of Catechumens (Casa dei Catecumeni) and the Archconfraternity of St. Joseph (Arciconfraternita di S. Giuseppe), two organizations that provided the social networks and financial resources necessary for Jewish and Muslim converts to enter Italian society. The final chapter provides a satisfying geographical and chronological survey of Jesuit confraternities in sixteenth-century Italy and offers some more general conclusions about the nature and methods of confra-ternal charity in the Society of Jesus. Lazar rounds out Working in the Vineyard with an appendix of papal briefs, concessions, decrees, and various other documents relating to Jesuit confraternities, arranged chronologically, from 1515 to 2003; another appendix with the numbers and status of women at S. Marta from 1543 to about 1578; some nicely reproduced images and period maps; extensive endnotes; and a thorough bibliography.

The strength of Lazar’s work is its balance. He situates the House of St. Martha, for example, in a tight account of the history of prostitution in the West that incorporates the best insights, but avoids the needless squabbles, of historical schools that champion “Catholic Reformation” or “Counter Reformation” as appropriate descriptions of early modern Catholic culture. In Lazar’s eminently sensible telling, the impulses to reform the Church before the Protestant Reformation provide the impetus for later reactions to Protestant criticisms. This approach allows him to preserve the historical integrity of the earlier impulses without reducing Catholic reformers to mere reactionaries, but also allows Lazar to resist the temptation to claim that the Church reformed the streets of Rome without the slightest concern for Protestant criticisms. Lazar also has a real knack for distributing a great deal of information evenly, which is no mean feat given the wealth of cultural, historical, economic, and theological detail that he includes in each chapter.

Lazar offers a particularly convincing case for that peculiar Jesuit ability to recapitulate the experiences of their founder in a seemingly endless variety of institutional forms. And so in Lazar’s account, we learn that the House of St. Martha was but one of many institutions that cast its staff and...