Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion in Renaissance Bologna (Cambridge Studies in Italian History and Culture) - Hardcover

Terpstra, Nicholas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0521480922 ISBN 13: 9780521480925

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 1996

Synopsis

The Renaissance is still often wrongly characterized as a period of religious indifference. Contradicting that viewpoint, this book examines confraternities: lay groups through which Italians of the Renaissance expressed their individual and collective religious beliefs. Intensely local and dominated by artisans and craftsmen, the confraternities shaped the civic religious cult through various activities such as charitable work, public shrines, and processions. This book puts these religious activities into the turbulent social and political context of Renaissance Bologna.

About this title

Book Description:

The Renaissance is still often characterised as a period of religious indifference. This book examines the confraternities, lay groups through which Italians of the Renaissance expressed their individual and co llective religious beliefs. Intensely local and predominantly artisinal, the confraternities shaped the civic religious cult through charitable activities, public shrines and processions. The book puts these religious activities into the turbulent social and political context of Renaissance Bologna.

From the Back Cover:

This book analyzes the social, political, and religious roles of confraternities - the lay groups through which the Italians of the Renaissance expressed their individual and collective religious beliefs - in Bologna in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Confraternities shaped the civic religious cult through charitable activities, public shrines, and processions. This civic religious role expanded as they became politicized: 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, patricians dominated the traditional lay confraternities while artisans and merchants had few options beyond parochial confraternities which were controlled by parish priests.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0521480922
• ISBN 13: 9780521480925
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272