Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion in Renaissance Bologna

An analysis of the social, political and religious role of confraternities in Renaissance Bologna, first published in 1995.

Nicholas Terpstra (Author)

9780521480925, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 30 November 1995

272 pages, 2 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.57 kg

"Nicholas Terpstra's study of civic religion in Renaissance Bologna is a significant contribution to the growing body of literature on lay confraternities...." Daniel Bornstein, Speculum

This 1995 book analyses the social, political and religious roles of the confraternities - the lay groups through which Italians of the Renaissance expressed their individual and collective religious beliefs - in Bologna in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. These confraternities shaped the civic religious cult through charitable activities, public shrines and processions. This civic religious role expanded as the confraternities became politicised: patricians used the confraternities increasingly in order to control the civic religious cult, civic charity, and the city itself. The book examines in detail how confraternities initially provided laypeople of the artisanal and merchant classes with a means of expressing a religious life separate from, but not in opposition to, the local parish or mendicant house. By the mid-sixteenth century, artisans and merchants had few options beyond parochial confraternities which were controlled by parish priests.

Introduction
Prologue
1. The early quattrocento
2. Lay spirituality and confraternal worship
3. The mechanics of worship
4. Communal identity, administration and finances
5. Confraternal charity and the civic cult in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries
Epilogue
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], European history [HBJD]