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

The scholarship on confraternities in late medieval and Renaissance Italy has expanded dramatically in recent years, most notably for Tuscany. Eisenbichler has focused on one important segment of this topic, the youth confraternities, in his monograph on the Florentine sodality of the Archangel Raphael.¹ Polizzotto's institutional history of the Florentine confraternity of the Purification documents the important role of these societies in the education and socialization of Florentine male adolescents.

The founding of these youth confraternities in Florence was part of a broader development dating back to the Black Death, to shift responsibility for social problems from the family to municipal government. The commune enacted legislation to protect orphans, promote the founding of hospitals, and control prostitution and homosexuality. Polizzotto suggests that this heightened concern with social problems and the efforts to ameliorate, if not solve, them was influenced by the first generation of humanists. Other Italian cities developed similar strategies to identify and solve social problems, but Florentines were unique in their preoccupation with youths as significant contributors to the city's welfare and survival. This cult of youth was integrated into the "myth of Florence," which identified the city as the "new Jerusalem" and its inhabitants as God's chosen people.

The confraternity of the Purification was founded in 1427, a spinoff from the first youth sodality, the Archangel Raphael, established in 1411. It was housed initially in the Servite church of SS. Annunziata, but in the 1440s, it moved to the nearby Dominican friary of S. Marco, in a site donated by Cosimo de' Medici. The confraternity's close association with S. Marco and its Observant Dominicans, most notably Savonarola, was a thread of continuity that persisted throughout its history.

Polizzotto has utilized the rich documentary record of the Purification, to trace its vicissitudinous history over four centuries. The fifteenth century was a period of growth and prosperity for the Purification, marked by increases in membership and resources. But the sodality suffered from its close identification with Savonarola and his agenda, and it lost favor with the city's Medici rulers from 1512 to 1527. It gradually revived under the Medici principate, though like all Florentine confraternities, it was occasionally shut down and its activities curtailed by authorities congenitally suspicious of those societies as sources of dissent. By the mid-seventeenth century, the Purification had begun a gradual but inexorable decline in numbers, wealth, and influence, culminating in the suppression of all confraternities by Pietro Leopoldo, the Austrian Grand Duke, in 1785.

Polizzotto describes how the confraternity adapted to changing conditions throughout its life span, while preserving its primary mission—preparing its youthful clientele for adulthood through intensive religious instruction and ceremonial participations. He asserts that in the fifteenth century, some 15 percent of the city's teenage adolescents were members of the sodality (40). In a society that became increasingly authoritarian, the confraternity retained its traditional mode of participatory governance, holding elections of officials and debates concerning the society's membership qualifications and its finances. Its governors recognized the need to promote its public image, "through sermons, laude, processions, trionfi, and sacre rappresentazioni" (147–48). Polizzotto has charted these devotional activities, as well as membership patterns, income and expenditures, and building projects. In the last decades before its suppression. the Purification concentrated its efforts increasingly on charitable activities. But this shift in focus did little to bolster the society's fortunes, its role as educator challenged by schools of Christian doctrine, and its autonomy curtailed by the post-Tridentine church.

Polizzotto's exemplary study of the rise and decline of the Purification mirrors the changes that transformed Florentine politics, society, and culture during the early modern era.