Faith’s Boundaries: Laity and Clergy in Early Modern Confraternities eds. by Nicholas Terpstra, Adriano Prosperi, and Stefania Pastore (review)

The essays in this collection explore early modern confraternal activities and lay life. A number come out of an Italian-focused conference, ‘Brotherhood and Boundaries—Fraternità e barriere’, that was held at Pisa in September 2008, but the geographical reach of this edited volume is somewhat broader.

Nicholas Terpstra’s Introduction sets the volume’s parameters as an interrogation of the ownership of religious space: confraternities, as spaces in which the laity and clergy both staked claims, were often sites where such ownership was negotiated. Part I of the volume investigates charity and civic religion in Italy: Daniel Bornstein presents a case study of Cortona’s Misericordia confraternity (a space, after 1411, for challenging Florence), while Anna Esposito looks at the metropolitan focus of Rome’s confraternities on needy foreign visitors. Carlo Taviani argues that Genoese confraternities offered alternatives to family-based factionalism and encouraged communalism; Cristina Cecchinelli contributes a particularly elegant paper on Marian groups in Parma, and their integration into the papal state made possible through links with organisations in Rome.

Part II looks at Florence, from Sabrina Corbellini’s fascinating study of gospel harmonies and other vernacular biblical texts in confraternal translation and use, to lay preachers’ confraternal educations in Peter Howard’s study of Pietro Bernardo. Olga Zorzi Pugliese investigates sermons of a different sort: Machiavelli’s ‘Exhortation to Penance’ and his parodical Rules for a Company of Pleasure.

Part III moves outside Italy. Maarten F. Van Dijck contributes a statistical analysis of the social capital of kinship groups in Aarschot, near Antwerp, while Juan O. Mesquida presents a history of Manila’s Misericordia confraternity. Part IV extends the brotherhood metaphor to Islam and Judaism. The essays by Alexandre Papas and Roni Weinstein in this section both stress the importance of mysticism to these contexts but their integration into the otherwise Catholic contexts of the volume (Protestant brotherhoods are not examined) raises as many questions as it explores.

Part V surveys race and gender in the confraternity: Federica Francesconi’s paper on Soed Holim, a charitable society organised by Jewish women in Modena’s ghetto, and Susan Verdi Webster’s investigation of native confraternities in Quito—which, she argues, could function as both ‘ethnic leveller’ and ‘ethnic refuge’—are strong contributions.

Part VI looks at sites of conflict between laypeople and clergy. Gavin Hammel compares responses to discipline confraternities in thirteenth-century Bologna and fourteenth-century Tournai, finding that differing class habitus (to borrow from Bourdieu) accounts for some clerical opposition in Tournai. Danilo Zardin deconstructs the truism that post-Tridentine confraternities became more clerical and disciplined in his survey of Genoa, Venice, Milan, and Como, and David Garrioch’s study of confraternities in eighteenth-century Paris and Milan explores contentious zones, from space and money, to clerical involvement and heresy.

Many of the contributions in this volume are close, convincingly argued interpretations of archival material. As a collection, they lay groundwork that will be of interest to researchers of confraternal studies and lay devotion more generally.