Confraternities and Civil Society

iii A Companion to Medieval and Renaissance Bologna Edited by Sarah Rubin Blanshei LEIDEN | BOSTON For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV Contents Contents v Contents Acknowledgements vii List of Illustrations viii Contributors xi xviii Introduction: History and Historiography of Bologna Sarah Rubin Blanshei 1 1 Archival Sources: Governmental, Judicial, Religious, Familial 26 Diana Tura 2 Fiscal Sources: the Estimi Rosa Smurra 3 Shaping the City: Urban Planning and Physical Structures Francesca Bocchi 4 Public Health G. Geltner 5 Regulating the Material Culture of Bologna la Grassa 129 Antonella Campanini 6 Economy and Demography 154 Fabio Giusberti and Francesca Roversi Monaco 7 Bankers, Financial Institutions, and Politics Massimo Giansante 185 8 Civic Institutions (12th-early 15th Centuries) Giorgio Tamba 211 9 From One Conflict to Another (13th-14th Centuries) Giuliano Milani 42 56 103 239 10 Libertas, Oligarchy, Papacy: Government in the Quattrocento Tommaso Duranti For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV 260 vi Contents 11 Popular Government, Government of the Ottimati, and the Languages of Politics: Concord and Discord (1377-1559) 289 Angela De Benedictis 12 Making of an Oligarchy: The Ruling Classes of Bologna 310 Andrea Gardi 13 Criminal Justice and Conflict Resolution 335 Sarah Rubin Blanshei and Sara Cucini 14 The Church, Civic Religion, and Civic Identity Gabriella Zarri 361 15 Confraternities and Civil Society 386 Nicholas Terpstra 16 Mendicant Orders and the Repression of Heresy 411 Riccardo Parmeggiani 17 The University and the City: Cultural Interactions David A. Lines 436 18 Bolognese Vernacular Language and Literature 474 Armando Antonelli and Vincenzo Cassì 19 Literary Culture in Bologna from the Duecento to the Cinquecento 499 Gian Mario Anselmi and Stefano Scioli 20 Miniaturists, Painters, and Goldsmiths (mid-13th-early 15th Century) 530 Raffaella Pini 21 Art and Patronage in Bologna’s “Long” Quattrocento 559 David J. Drogin General Bibliography 601 Index 605 000 For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV 386 Terpstra Chapter 15 Confraternities and Civil Society Nicholas Terpstra When confraternities emerged and multiplied in the communal struggles of the 13th century, they designated themselves as “spiritual companies” parallel to Bologna’s artisanal companies (guilds) and military companies (militias or armed societies). This self-conscious insertion of confraternities into the local communal social order underscored that both individually and collectively they never saw themselves as “purely” devotional groups, mendicant auxiliaries, or practical burial societies, but as necessary constituents of Bolognese civil society. Members preserved this rhetoric, identity, and task over the following three centuries, working most actively in the areas of institutional charity and civic cult, and expanding most rapidly in the 15th and 16th centuries. In this latter period, the spiritual companies multiplied in numbers and members, became diffused widely throughout the city, and opened or operated many new institutional charities for the sick and marginal, and also many religious shrines. Behind their rising numbers lies a more complex picture of how confraternities negotiated the politics of gender, class, republicanism, and devotion through those two centuries – both how they expressed and participated in the changes in these areas, but also how these politics fundamentally reshaped the confraternities themselves. Although their numbers and profile increased dramatically, their influence steadily declined, and by the 17th century confraternities played a less constructive and constituent role in Bolognese civil society than they had during the communal period. This essay reviews how confraternal engagement in civil society was shaped around civic religion, gender, and charity, before turning to consider how issues of archives and sources complicate research into these themes. Civic Religion and Civil Society Investigating confraternities and civil society in the Middle Ages and Renaissance requires first looking at civic religion, since it was the local cult which provided confraternities with much of the legitimacy for the role they performed in civil society. But that is itself problematic. So much of ecclesiastical religion focused around intercession, and civic religion had both © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004355644_017 For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV Confraternities and Civil Society 387 ecclesiastical forms (which privileged clerical structures and personnel) and lay forms (which often aimed to circumvent those social forms, while necessarily working closely with them). Gabriella Zarri has written extensively on the Bolognese church and civic religion, with attention to the shaping of a local civic cult around four resonant ecclesiastical spaces: the civic basilica of San Petronio on Piazza Maggiore in the city center where sons of the local patriciate constituted the community of canons; the convent of Corpus Domini where the daughters of that same elite joined Caterina de’ Vigri in forming a community of Poor Clares; the Benedictine complex of Santo Stefano, which was shaped as Bologna’s sancta Jerusalem; and the hill-top sanctuary of the Madonna of San Luca just south of the city, which had no single community of clerical superintendants and was perhaps the most contested of all as a result.1 The first three sites marked critical fixed points of the space within the city walls, while the fourth was positioned outside and high above those walls, yet was home to an icon which regularly entered into and travelled the streets of that circumscribed space. Basilica, monastery, convent, shrine. As distinct places, spaces, and institutions, these four points of the ecclesiastical compass were the geographical and social reference points for Bolognese local religion in its clerical and intercessory dimension. When we look at lay religion, it is important to also note some absences. None of these four sites had a resident confraternity dedicated to the place or devotion. Notably, Bologna never had a Compagnia di San Petronio, nor any company dedicated to Santo Stefano or the Madonna di San Luca, and its later Corpus Domini confraternities emerged as part of 16th-century peninsular devotional movements and not around this very important convent. In what must have been a tacit recognition of their resonant centrality to the local cult, these four reference points remained the common possession of all rather than the particular charge of a single group of laity. This allowed a number of confraternities to fashion their public presence around some of them, and the Madonna di San Luca in particular, especially from the later 14th century. The civic religion that grew up around these four ecclesiastical sites was local not only in its geography, but also its history. Zarri notes that San Petronio, Corpus Domini, and the Madonna di San Luca all emerged in the century following establishment of the popular regime in 1376. Each reflected in ecclesiastical terms the efforts of that popular regime and the local patriciate to take distance from the papal overlords and to take responsibility for local cultic life. Their structures, communities, and rituals evoked a confident view 1 Zarri, “Chiesa, religione, società,” pp. 916-23, and see her essay in this volume. For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV 388 Terpstra of Bologna’s place in sacred history that extended back to the time of Petronius and his reworking of Santo Stefano, and that moved forward in a chronicle of challenges, crises, and religious revivals which each left some trace on the city’s social, institutional, and spiritual fabric. The roughly two centuries following emergence of the popular regime constitute a distinct stage in the city’s civic religion. Through the first century, it developed a localism marked by tensions with – and sometimes opposition to – the curial center. Through the second century, this gap closed significantly and Bologna’s local religion moved into closer alignment with a more distinctly Roman catholicism. These moves in civic religion mirrored the developments in Bologna’s civic politics. In the two decades following 1376, the popular regime and patriciate developed the governing bodies that aimed to minimize if not entirely eliminate the effects of Rome’s temporal sovereignty: 26 masters of the guilds (massari delle arti), 16 standard-bearers of the people (gonfalonieri del popolo), and 16 elders (anziani). These elected bodies oversaw economic life, defense, and legislation and daily governance. The individual magistrates were elected to short terms, and represented either an economic activity (the masters of the guilds) or a city quarter (the standard-bearers and the elders). By 1394, the strong lobbying of Bologna’s patricians resulted in establishment of a fourth body, the 16 Reformers (Sedici Riformatori dello stato di libertà), who were formally elected by the masters and the elders, but whose life-terms and evolving practice of family succession soon turned them into the dominant oligarchical body that grew to supplant the others. In a slow, uneven, but inevitable development, the 16 Riformatori were expanded to the 21-member Reggimento by Paul II in 1466, and then to the 40-member Senato by Leo X in the 1510s. In the 1550s they organized themselves into a series of eight major administrative congregations called Assunterie to oversee everything from food supply, defense, coinage, the university, the silk industry, and construction. This effectively completed their takeover of local government and reduced the other communal bodies to a purely decorative role as ritual actors in the local theater of politics.2 The papacy’s disarray through the later 14th century allowed the communal government to establish itself, while the strategic interventions of later popes faciliated its marginalization by the oligarchical Sedici-Reggimento-Senato.3 Papal monarchs from Nicholas V through Julius II to Sixtus V who were intent 2 De Benedictis, Repubblica per contratto, pp. 107-64, 187-92, 198-201; Robertson, Tyranny under the Mantle, pp. 31-65, 169-202; Carboni, “Public Debt”; Guenzi, “Politica ed economia.” 3 On the fundamental continuity between these three bodies, and the use of these three terms to designate the three distinct stages: Fasoli, “Bologna nell’età medievale,” pp. 188-89. For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV Confraternities and Civil Society 389 on mastering Italian power politics knew that mastering Bolognese civic politics was a necessary first step to controlling the Papal State and the peninsula, and skillfully played on internal divisions to achieve this goal. The Council of Trent was critical to this process on the ecclesiastical side, though it should never be seen as a purely external force. The most influential Tridentine ecclesiastics in Bologna were themselves bolognesi, particularly Archbishop Gabriele Paleotti and Pope Gregory XIII. Both had tense relations with Bolognese political authorities – and indeed with each-other – and both used political means to gain religious goals and vice versa. This brief digression into the dynamics of local and papal politics is a necessary context for the larger issues around confraternities, civic religion, and civil society. Confraternities grew in number, memberships, and activity under the communal regime, to the point that there were dozens by the end of the Bentivoglio signory in 1506, gathering roughly 20 per cent of the urban adult population.4 Growth accelerated from the later 16th century when the senatorial oligarchy was more firmly in control. Their public spaces and devotions through the earlier period were marked by efforts to craft a lay-directed civic religion that was consonant with communal values while being woven around local sites and traditions. In their cultic, charitable, and social activities, they self-consciously promoted the corpus christianum and bono communi, though of course they often differed radically in how they defined and fulfilled it.5 Their internal administrations reflected local civil-social developments both in their early embrace of broad geographically-based memberships and elected administrative councils whose members served short terms, and also in the later shift towards more limited and selective memberships and more hierarchical administrative councils. The anti-papal element evident in some of the new devotions of the communal period fades as 16th-century devotions follow ecclesiastical reform movements, take up ecclesiastical tools like indulgences and privileges, and find themselves subject to episcopal visitations and regulations. Shrines and processions were the critical currency of civic religion in Bologna’s communal period, and for good reason. Both put laity in the role of patron-supplicants, with robes, properties, and actions that allowed them to move to center stage while bypassing the awkward reality that it was ordained 4 For a broader overview of Bolognese confraternities: Fanti, Confraternite e città; Idem, “Confraternite e istituzioni di assistenza”; Terpstra, Lay Confraternities. 5 See two recent essay collections for comparative treatment of the theme across Europe: Lecuppre-Desjardin and Van Bruaene, De bono communi; Eckstein and Terpstra, Sociability and its Discontents. For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV 390 Terpstra clergy who were the real intercessory agents in Catholicism. Thirteen major shrine cults emerged in this period, seven within the circuit of the city walls, four on public buildings or bridges in the city, and two on the summits of hills that bounded Bologna to the south.6 Lay bolognesi in their confraternities were critical to the expansion of each, though never without clerical support, and that of Bishop Niccolò Albergati (bishop from 1417-43) in particular. The example of the Madonna di San Luca shows how laity and clergy worked together. Albergati realized the potential of the Madonna di San Luca, and recruited the confraternity of the Trentatré to clean up its derelict site, and the confraternity of Santa Maria della Morte to undertake the first procession of the icon into the city in 1433. The confratelli of the Morte would be the chief lay custodians of the cult over the coming centuries, gaining considerable status as a result, and defending their rights vociferously against local clergy. They brought the Madonna into the city during times of crisis and eventually for a three-day visit at every rogation tide, processing with her to Santo Stefano, San Petronio, and a host of other churches, shrines, confraternities, and public buildings. Yet each evening of these three days, the Morte confratelli returned the Madonna to the altar of their own confraternal chapel. Their central role in these processions of the Madonna di San Luca, together with their major hospital adjacent to San Petronio, and their work assisting prisoners and comforting those condemned to death gave the confratelli of Santa Maria della Morte an unparalleled public profile as chief lay liturgists of the civic-religious cult, and fed a marked ennobling of the membership from the mid-15th century. Bologna’s communal civic religion connected resonant ecclesiastical sites and the lay spiritual companies by means of major processions and institutional charity. Examples multiplied through the 15th century. A key one is the confraternity of Santa Maria degli Angeli, established in 1450 as a merger of four groups to run a newly-opened eponymous foundling home. The home may have been inspired by Florence’s Ospedale degli Innocenti, which had opened only six years earlier. The Angeli confraternity underscored and localized the Florentine inspiration when it began an annual procession on the Feast day of the Holy Innocents (December 28). It dressed some of the young foundlings in white robes and wings to pose as angels, and the men of the confraternity then led them through the streets of the city to Santo Stefano, where they honored relics of the Holy Innocents slain by order of King Herod. The Compagnia dei Lombardi, a cross between an armed and spiritual company, was the only lay company to have its quarters within Santo Stefano, and in 1494 6 Terpstra, Lay Confraternities, pp. 205-16. For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV Confraternities and Civil Society 391 it would be forcibly merged into Santa Maria degli Angeli as that confraternity, by then heavily patronized by the Bentivoglio family, was struggling to find funds to pay for the monumental foundling home that it was constructing. The confratelli and their juvenile angels set out from the main doors of a foundling home that occupied a prominent city block. It faced onto Via San Mamolo, Bologna’s major north-south ceremonial route and a realignment of the cardus of ancient Roman Bononia (Via Emilia was the decumanus). To the rear was the ancient cardus itself (Via Val d’Aposa), and the entrance to the convent of Corpus Domini over the road. The central location underscored the foundling home’s place in local charity and civic religion. Children looking from the windows or portico of the foundling home to San Mamolo would have witnessed many religious processions, including that of the Madonna della Vittoria, a major event which the anziani declared to mark Bologna’s victory over Milanese armies on 14 August 1443. Before the battle, the brothers of the Compagnia della Morte had brought the Madonna di San Luca into the city and paraded her around – the first time that she had been brought into the city to guard against threats by human enemies rather than by storms, droughts, famines, and other natural threats. After the victory, the anziani decreed anniversary celebrations in which members of the armed, artisanal, and spiritual Companies, together with communal magistrates, moved out of the Palazzo Comunale, up Via San Mamolo and out the eponymous gate up the hill to the shrine of the Madonna della Vittoria. With this remarkable procession, the largest city in the Papal State marked a military victory that jeopardized papal control over it. The Feast of the Madonna della Vittoria symbolized how Bologna’s civic religion – like that of Venice – could weave the lay and the clerical together in a way that privileged the local and bypassed Rome. The communal government and spiritual companies took tools created or promoted by Bishop Albergati – who had died just three months before the August 1443 battle – and used them to advance a civic religion which emphasized that Bologna’s cult and politics were not subject to the papal masters whom Albergati had served. Doing this effectively required having lay religious groups that fulfilled significant cultic and charitable functions, including some that positioned themselves as civic liturgists with some of the key ecclesiastical sites of the city. In Bologna, as in Venice, confraternities fulfilled precisely that function. Confraternal devotional agency would become more troubling to ecclesiastical officials over time, and they made various efforts to supplant the lay liturgists. The Compagnia della Morte had to fight continually to maintain its custodianship of the main rogation processions of the Madonna di San Luca. Episcopal visits eliminated lay-directed practices and priorities – like lay For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV 392 Terpstra preaching, Bible possession, and an emphasis on mutual assistance – in a number of confraternities, like the Compagnia dei Poveri examined below. Yet by the late 16th century more savvy papal authorities realized that spiritual gifts were more effective than spiritual penalties as a means of co-opting confraternities, particularly when their membership was shifting from artisans to an ennobled class that was ever on the hunt for status-boosting privileges, honors, and connections. We can trace these shifting social politics of devotion by examining changes to chapel decoration in the elite Confraternity of the Madonna della Consolazione, detta della Cintura. The Bentivoglio-sponsored group emerged in 1495 in a chapel just inside the main doors of the Augustinian church of San Giacomo. It declined rapidly after the family’s fall in 1506, but then revived when Gregory XIII joined the brotherhood, endowed it with indulgences, and raised it to archconfraternal status in 1575. The chapel’s famous 15th-century narrative fresco of the Adoration of the Magi, which celebrated the confraternity’s connection to the Augustinians, was then completely covered over with an elaborate frame that left only the Virgin and Child visible. The Madonna was crowned in 1600, and so effectively turned into a devotional icon whose spiritual resonance came not from local associations but from the strategic favors of a series of popes in Rome.7 Successive pontiffs followed this strategy. Most 16th-century popes amply enriched the spiritual treasuries of spiritual companies with plenary indulgences, though of course they did this across Christendom. In Bologna, Julius II and Leo X brought Santa Maria del Baraccano, which for a century had been the leading company associated with the Bentivoglio, closer to Rome with strategic visits and spiritual benefits. Gregory XIII and Sixtus V and other later 16th-century popes successfully drew many of the older communal brotherhoods like Santa Maria della Vita (the city’s oldest), Santa Maria della Morte, Buon Gesù, the Madonna della Consolazione, Santi Sebastiano e Rocco, and Santa Maria Maddalena more closely into Rome’s orbit with archconfraternal status. This promotion secured their primacy over other local confraternities, but did so by violating a traditional local protocol that ranked older over newer companies. In 1576, Gregory XIII gave Santa Maria della Morte the privilege of releasing one prisoner annually from jail, and in 1604 Clement VIII extended the same privilege to the Compagnia dei Poveri.8 Finally, a series of civic and specifically confraternal Marian icons was crowned through the 17th century following the Madonna della Consolazione in 1600. These included the 7 Rousakis, “From Image of Devotion.” 8 Terpstra, Cultures of Charity, p. 268. For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV Confraternities and Civil Society 393 Madonna di San Luca (1603), the Madonna del Reno (1604), Madonna del Soccorso (1612), Madonna de’ Poveri (1624), Madonna del Rosario (1634), and eventually the Madonna della Vittoria.9 Gender, Charity, and Civil Society Women played a larger role in Bologna’s spiritual companies than they ever could in either its military or its artisanal companies, yet that role changed significantly from the medieval into the early modern period.10 The mixed gender confraternities of the 14th and early 15th century were transformed under Observant reforms of the mid-15th, and from that time single-sex sodalities expanded, with women’s groups having greater or lesser degrees of self-direction under lay or clerical male supervisors. It was less a matter of the earlier spiritual companies having a conscious ideology of including women, than of the latter ones having a definite policy of excluding them. The Observant reforms built themselves around purification through exclusion, and so abandoned the default inclusivity that considered women central to civil society in favor of a deliberate exclusivity that aimed to preserve the pure devotion and community of insiders by keeping out many individuals and groups considered threatening.11 From the point of view of civil society, the issue was never gender in isolation, but its relation to class and space. The mixed-gender medieval groups were collectivities organized in resistance against the same noble, patrician, and clerical overlords that the military and artisanal companies struggled against. The medieval and Renaissance armed, artisanal, and spiritual companies together represented a vision of the commune based on city quarters (as distinct from parishes, for example) where the range of professional, artisanal, merchant, and service occupations ranked between day laborers and a noble elite expressed the lay-directed civic religion. The early modern separate gender groups took a designated space within a more hierarchical order where religion was more clearly the business of the clerical profession, and where any lay devotees would have to devote far more time, money, and energy to their 9 10 11 Masini, Bologna Perlustrata, vol. 1, pp. 54, 93, 67, 303, 486. Masini claims that the Cintura was crowned in 1602, p. 96. Terpstra, Lay Confraternities, pp. 116-32. Sherri Franks Johnson finds that nuns in particular continued to carve out a significant role for themselves in late medieval Bologna, and that they were not systematically marginalized through the period. See Johnson, Monastic Women. For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV 394 Terpstra brotherhoods than had earlier been the case. This left working men in a more ambiguous position, since they had fewer finances or time to devote to their confraternities. Lay women faced that limitation, plus the conventional misogynist trope that the daughters of Eve were temptresses which any spiritually-attuned man ought to avoid. Women had not taken elected supervisory roles in medieval and Renaissance spiritual companies, but it would not be accurate to say that they were either invisible or purely auxiliary. They may have been less evident in the records of officers and in the minutes of meetings, but they were fully present and sometimes even dominated in those public actions most central to the companies’ civic, charitable, and cultic roles: maintaining and praying in public shrines, preparing meals and beds in hospitals, joining in processions, singing the religious songs by which the spiritual companies made their presence known in the soundscape of the city. In Bologna as across Italy, lay women gathered in communities of bizzoche and pinzochere carried out the same kinds of charitable and cultic activities. The communal government of 1376 brought greater political power to those social groups who had constituted the artisanal, armed, and spiritual companies, and the 15th-century flowering of confraternities reflects the confident social construction of those who were now regularly moving through the commune’s various magistracies. They had won and this was now their world within the city walls. They filled it with shrines, hospitals, and confraternal chapels, and the 1443 procession of the Madonna della Vittoria signaled their triumph. Yet the steady expansion of the self-perpetuating Sedici-ReggimentoSenato, thanks in part to its role in re-negotiating with each new pope the 1447 capitoli of Nicholas V which constituted Bologna’s “treaty” with Rome, put the lie to their confidence.12 Oligarchic expansion slowly eroded the power of elected communal magistracies even though it was useful and indeed necessary to keep them in place. The oligarchical political and financial elite that coalesced around wealthy families like the Pepoli, Malvezzi, Marescotti, and the Bentivoglio found its counterpart in a new spiritual elite which was emerging in confraternities thanks to the Observant reforms. The latter would slowly transform the membership and public/civil character of confraternal life. Their more intense devotional life, including frequent attendance at Divine Office and devotional exercises like foot washing and collective flagellation was a learned and time consuming spirituality more suited to professionals and merchants than to laborers and artisans. Its conceit of the imitation of Christ was more suited to 12 De Benedictis, Repubblica per contratto, pp. 86-103. For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV Confraternities and Civil Society 395 men than to women. Its emphasis on maintaining the purity of God’s chosen ones fed fears of those whose actions, occupations, or very existence was impure and polluting. This increased the provisions around discipline and sometimes led to the creation of new confraternities or of exclusive subgroups of more zealous members within existing confraternities. These devotional subgroups designated themselves the stretta (as opposed to the larga) or the Compagnia dell’Oratorio (as opposed to the Compagnia dell’Ospedale). It is telling that lay confratelli used the spatial and locational terms “narrow” and “broad” or “Oratory” and “Hospital”, while clerical reformers in religious orders used the behavioral terms “observant” and “conventual” (which originally designated the religious community in its corporate life, and not a residence). The spatial-locational referents underscored that lay confraternities saw themselves as occupying the saeculum while implicitly leaving the spiritual realm to clerical professionals. Members of the stretta or Oratory subgroups committed themselves to maintaining the spiritual purity of their subgroup, including tighter recruitment and training of new members, far more frequent individual and group spiritual exercises, and mutual discipline and expulsion of the erring. They banned not only those who might have done immoral deeds – adulterers, murderers, and thieves – but also a broad category of those who were considered impure by definition: policemen, Jews – and above all women. The gendering of confraternal piety was the greatest transformation of confraternal civil society in the 15th and 16th centuries, both in Bologna and beyond.13 The Observant spiritual elite that emerged in stretta and Oratory subgroups within otherwise unchanged confraternities paralleled the emergence of an exclusive oligarchical council within a communal political order that also appeared unchanged on the surface. In both cases, these elites radically redirected institutional forms and values over time. Just as the SediciReggimento-Senato represented the camel that stuck its nose into the political tent and eventually came to occupy it and displace the original inhabitants, the Observant stretta-oratory confraternities represented the leading edge of confraternal institutional life, which eventually marginalized older forms and in some cases squeezed them out. And in civic religion as in civil society, the Observant reforms in spiritual companies often began in upper class confraternities that had the resources to offer more impressive processions, shrines, and public cultic life – clear signs of the right to lead. When they emerged in exist- 13 For some similar dynamics in Emilia and Milan, see Gazzini, Confraternite e societa cittàdina, pp. 157-96, 257-79. For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV 396 Terpstra ing large companies that ran hospitals, they gradually marginalized or even excluded female, artisanal, and laboring members over time. Women resisted these developments. One or two artisanal confraternities like San Bernardino da Siena kept women in the broader membership, at least until episcopal visitors ordered it to stop in 1593.14 The patrician women of Santa Maria del Baraccano actively resisted their marginalization by that company’s stretta group, though in the end unsuccessfully. The fight within that confraternity intensified after 1527 when the Baraccano transformed its pilgrims’ hostel into a conservatory for adolescent girls who had been orphaned and abandoned in the wake of the famines and plagues of the mid-1520s. Over the coming two decades, this temporary expedient turned into a complete redirection of the confraternity’s charitable mission. It was clear even to observant reformers that a confraternity that spent a good deal of its energy and resources on running a conservatory for adolescent girls could not do so without a number of female members to oversee day-to-day living conditions in the home. This work of cooking, changing beds, cleaning floors and nursing the sick was essentially what female members had carried out a century before when the Baraccano shelter, located just inside the Santo Stefano gate on the main route to Florence, took in travelers and pilgrims. Yet in keeping with elite social dynamics, these female members would not simply be members of a single undifferentiated spiritual company as before, but would gain a separate sisterhood of their own, with a designated space and set of rituals and devotions, and some officers operating under male oversight.15 The Baraccano women’s company emerged in 1527 when the hostel first changed into a conservatory, and it attracted a considerable number of elite women. Their first set of statutes in 1548 made them the self-governing cogovernors of the conservatory. A second set of statutes, issued in 1553 as part of an effort to resolve the Baraccano’s long-simmering internal feud between larga and stretta, stripped the women of their self-government and consigned them more decisively under male control as little more than staff. These developments in Bolognese confraternities were an adaptation of the broader Observant drive for a gendered form of institutional purity that would carry on to Trent and beyond. Reformers pushed successfully for tighter enclosure of female convents, the transformation of Third Order communities into enclosed 14 15 ASB, Demaniale, San Bernardino, 8/7639, Filza 2. For more background and archival references for this dispute, see Terpstra, Abandoned Children, pp. 236-38. For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV Confraternities and Civil Society 397 residential groups, and the elimination or claustration of older communities of bizzoche and pinzochere.16 Other confraternities followed this path of establishing separate subgroups for women in the 1550s and 1560s, including Santa Maria della Pietà (1547), Santissimo Crocifisso del Cestello (1549), Santa Croce (1552), and Buon Gesù (1569). In most cases their defining activity was charity, and particularly institutional charity offered to the needy girls and women of the city. This continued as Bologna moved through the 1560s and 1570s towards a more comprehensive system of social charity organized as the Opera Pia dei Poveri Mendicanti that aimed to concentrate the local poor in the Casa di Santa Maria della Misericordia, a tax-supported shelter – eventually a workhouse – outside the eastern city walls.17 The organizing body for the ambitious plan was a Compagnia della Misericordia that was run like a confraternity, with donations securing both membership and the right (and obligation) to volunteer in the home’s administration. In its earliest form, in 1560-63, the Compagnia della Misericordia followed the model of the traditional spiritual companies, and fulfilled the expectations of that broader communal society. Yet this was also the period when the Senate and Bolognese patriciate were seeking to consolidate their hold on local government, and further marginalize communal governing institutions. In the first revision of the Misericordia’s statutes in 1570, the communal forms were diluted, the civic tax abandoned, the hundreds of volunteers dismissed, and the entire operation was refashioned as a professional service built to maximize the forced-labor potential of the paupers’ shelter, which was now divided into two: one shelter for older boys and men, and the other for younger children and all females. At this point, the Misericordia’s separate women’s company gained greater definition and duties, and a more exclusively patrician membership, and started to take a larger role in overseeing administration of the enclosed women’s workhouse. The confraternities of the period of Catholic reform would prove quite different from those of the communal period, refashioned by different social expectations, models of professionalization in religion, and the effort to make the Catholic Church more effective as a pastoral and disciplinary body. This was what the Observant reform was most fundamentally about, and it should be no surprise that one of the more widely adopted changes was the implict or 16 17 Bologna’s nuns resisted this intensification of enclosure, as Craig Monson has shown in two books rich in Bolognese examples: Monson, Disembodied Voices; Idem, Nuns Behaving Badly. For more on this process, with archival references, see Terpstra, Cultures of Charity, pp. 55-138. For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV 398 Terpstra explicit gendering of the spiritual companies. By the later 16th century, the confraternal landscape was changing significantly across the city and indeed across Italy as bishops aimed to animate the spiritual life of parishes and recruit laity to help deliver the corporal and spiritual works of charity. The number of spiritual companies expanded rapidly, as did their memberships. More parishes established Christian Doctrine confraternities through which men and women taught reading, writing, and religion to the children of parish or district, and Holy Sacrament confraternities to tend the altars and help bring the sacrament to the sick and dying. In 1568, Paleotti brought down new rules for the governance of hospitals (Ordinationi fatte per il buon governo di tutti gli hospitali del contado e diocese di Bologna), followed in 1574 by a common missal for confraternities (the Libro delle Compagnie Spirituali) and in 1583 a common set of statutes. These together set out standard administrative models that gave the bishop more oversight over lay religious and charitable institutions, and priests more authority within them. They signaled a new civic religious order in which spiritual companies were the lay auxiliaries of parish clergy who were working with and through them to building a holy Bologna from the parish level.18 This two-part model of lay confraternities and secular clergy building a holy city from the level of the parish was different from the medieval three-part model of lay spiritual companies collaborating with armed and artisanal companies to build a communal civil society from the level of the city quarters. In both periods, the administrative conventions exercised in the confraternities demonstrated what form of civil society they identified with and aimed to build. The medieval companies exercised the same communal administrative forms found in their armed and artisanal counterparts, with regular elections for the officers who oversaw membership, finances, and charitable activity, and who appointed the priest who carried out religious services. The early modern parochial companies followed the professional model of emerging bureaucracies, with officials appointed by the priest, who directed the members, oversaw activities, and exercised religious services, including discipline. This could be expected, and while both in their own way were seeking to realize the corpus christianum from a defined space or area in the city, it did result in very different expressions of civil society. It is worth noting that women were less often marginalized into separate groups in the parochial companies. While male members familiar with the communal forms would have found reduced agency in groups run by the priest, female members would experience little difference. 18 Prodi, Il Cardinale, vol. 2, pp. 181-214. For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV Confraternities and Civil Society 399 Some of the older communal spiritual companies like Santa Maria della Vita, Santa Maria della Morte, Buon Gesù, and Santi Sebastiano e Rocco continued on, although they tended to undergo a process of ennobling over the long 16th century, ending up with more exclusive memberships than they had started out with. One example of a newer company experiencing rapid ennobling is the Compagnia dei Poveri, which seven poor artisans established in 1576 to organize devotions and pilgrimages. It survived some early setbacks and developed through the 1580s into an ambitious mutual assistance group aiming to offer sick pay and unemployment insurance to members on an insurance model.19 Perhaps most radically, it also offered maternity benefits, a sign that it had many women, and above all working poor women, among its members. By some ambiguous reports, it quickly became the largest company in Bologna, with perhaps 2500 male and female members. Since financial and administrative records for this period do not survive, it is difficult to tell whether the insurance plan ever functioned, though the statutes suggest that the company trusted more on the good will of members to continue paying dues after they had received benefits than on solid actuarial science. The Compagnia dei Poveri extended the communal charitable values of the older spiritual companies to the local working poor, including even those non-bolognesi who were often excluded from other older civic confraternities. It fell foul of the post-Tridentine expectation that confraternities tend their altars as the primary means of tending to members’ needs: a series of episcopal visits from 1581 to 1652 highlighted its officers’ decision to spend money on charity rather than liturgical furnishings as a serious failing, and forced a change of statutes to remedy the defect. From 1598, new and wealthier members joined the confraternity, took over its administration, and redirected its priorities and finances from charitable to cultic activities. By 1627, the Compagnia dei Poveri was a largely elite group, with new baroque quarters, an ample spiritual treasury of indulgences, a far healthier balance sheet, and very few if any poor members. The “Seven Founders” would continue to be lauded in company histories, but the Compagnia dei Poveri no longer recruited members from among poor artisans, and quite deliberately dropped those services that might have eased their condition. “Poverty” became a largely spiritual attribute. This is one example of the transformation that slowly altered virtually all of those communal spiritual companies remaining in Bologna as the city itself gradually shed many of the functioning institutions of medieval communal society and adopted the political and bureaucratic forms of the ancien régime. 19 Terpstra, Cultures of Charity, pp. 233-41. Fanti, “La chiesa e la Compagnia dei Poveri,” pp. 175-304. For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV 400 Terpstra The causality around this is complicated, and sketching it quickly is not meant to simplify a complex process. At best, it puts certain long-term developments into correlation, with the understanding that causality works both ways in a generally changing ethos around class and gender. But it is important to recognize that the shifts in whether and how women could participate in confraternities, civic religion, and civil society were neither incidental nor simply the collateral damage of a larger social process. Gender, with class, was fundamental to redefining both civic religion and civil society. The changes to how both women and artisans participated in Bolognese confraternities is perhaps the most readily-grasped incidence of those larger changes marking the period. Adapting Sarah Blanshei’s analysis, we might see the institutional marginalizing and enclosing of women and artisans as part of the emerging habitus of the more patrician and patriarchal oligarchy which tightened its grip on Bologna through these centuries.20 It was the habitus of the ancien régime. The new models were sometimes more efficient when it came to delivering charity than the old had been, though of course efficiency had never been a stated goal of the medieval spiritual companies. They had set their sights on inclusivity, honesty, and human frailty – organizing large memberships by volunteer administrators cycling in frequent rotation and under close oversight precisely because they could not be trusted. The large medieval communal groups had audited their administrations for signs of financial corruption, while the later early modern groups looked for signs of individual moral corruption and used tools of mutual discipline and expulsion to reinforce social divisions. This radical re-visioning of the purpose and functioning of confraternities certainly had an impact on how they served as expressions of civil society and as vehicles of civic religion, and so ought to inform historical research. Civic Religion and Civic Archives: the Challenge of Sources The effort to track confraternities’ role in civil society sends us to a number of distinct archives in Bologna. The kinds of records remaining vary widely from group to group, due either to the accuracy of early record keepers, the selective pruning of later members or administrators, and the mergers or suppressions which took place through the early modern period, under the Cisalpine Republic from 1796, or after the Risorgimento. The major deposits are in the Archivio di Stato di Bologna, the Biblioteca Comunale dell’Archiginnasio, the Archivio Arcivescovile, and the Archivio Universitario. Isabella Zanni Rosiello 20 Blanshei, “Habitus. Identity and Formation,” pp. 143-57. For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV Confraternities and Civil Society 401 has recently shown how the late 18th-century creation of the public archives and their deposits was a stage in a longer process by which local authorities in state and church aimed to control the narrative of the past by controlling access to documents and by commissioning, censoring, and censuring histories.21 What records did confraternities keep, and when and how did they keep them? Marina Gazzini has recently distinguished a late medieval and Renaissance period of the confraternal archive as “deposit” followed in the later 16th century by a second phase of the archive as a “memory” or “source” (memoria-fonte). She describes how record keeping first became common in the 13th century as the spiritual companies developed from informal groupings or mendicant auxiliaries into corporations that accumulated indulgences and legacies for masses.22 These might be passed down from one officer to another at each election, particularly for those groups that had no space of their own. Once confraternities began opening shrines and hospitals in the 14th century, their day-to-day finances, coupled with increasing legacies, led more groups to set aside a chest or a cupboard in which the most important documents would be stored securely. Many of the earliest statutes date from this period, and they begin to include a secretary-treasurer among the upper administration. Whether massaro, camponiero, cancelliere, or scrivano, this individual was now entrusted with keeping the group’s documents, ledgers, contracts, and statutes. This was mercantile behavior from a mercantile class, and the records this group thought were worth keeping did not necessarily reflect what they thought was most characteristic of their spiritual or charitable life. That was hardly the point, since the records deposited with the secretary-treasurer had a purely practical function related to his administrative responsibilities. Nor was it physically possible to keep and store ephemeral or spiritual works when all the documents had to be shoved into the same small chest or cabinet. Through the course of the 16th century more confraternities appointed dedicated archivists. If they had quarters of their own, as some of the larger charitable groups certainly did, they moved beyond financial and notarial records towards collecting more broadly historical records like plays, catechisms, sermons, and other pious literature, often with an eye to asserting their antiquity or certain privileges.23 Gazzini dates the change in Milan to 1575, the year when Carlo Borromeo ordered an overhaul of archepiscopal, parochial, and historical archives with an eye to conserving, ordering, and classifying all 21 22 23 Zanni Rosiello, “L’Archivio, memoria della città,” pp. 435-41. Gazzini, “Gli archivi delle confraternite,” pp. 369-90. Gazzini, “Gli archivi delle confraternite,” pp. 381-87. For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV 402 Terpstra the materials necessary for improved fiscal and spiritual administration. The changed attitude towards archives brought a changed material culture and spatial dimension. Documents once crammed into an overstuffed cassone or armadio were now being filed and shelved in separate rooms. Archivists always kept only the most necessary documents, but their sense of what was necessary was broadening. After Trent, antiquity provided one of the few loopholes allowing local churches to avoid new liturgical norms and retain local practices, meaning that documents could be as valuable as relics.24 A tradition of forgery followed on the ancient traditions of holy theft of relics and piously fictive saints’ lives. One example was the archivist of Milan’s elite Scuola delle Quattro Marie finding, in 1619, a copy of the brotherhood’s formal approval by Archbishop Angilberto II in 845 wedged between the pages of a 1470 libro mastro. The Quattro Marie was in fact a 13th-century foundation, but the practically illegible 9th-century document, apparently lifted from a juridical codex, seeded a longer series of fraudulent historical documents that now filled the archives of the Quattro Marie. Among these was another document, purportedly from 1100, giving the names of 24 Milanese confratelli who had just returned from Crusade; all were, of course, of politically prominent families from the later medieval period, and none are found in any other 11th- or 12thcentury documentation.25 Such transparent frauds were found in Bologna as well, as Mario Fanti showed in his careful exposé of a vigorous 18th-century priest who served with the conforteria of Santa Maria della Morte. Carlo Antonio Macchiavelli was the brother of the notorious literary forger Alessandro Macchiavelli, and the two collaborated to insert a late 15th-century ancestor, Luigi di Leonardo Macchiavelli into the Compagnia della Morte’s history as an active member and the author in 1490 of its guide for comforting those condemned to die. They recopied and re-organized the group’s records, added miniatures and frontispieces taken from other manuscripts and titles written in a poor approximation of a 15th-century hand, and recast an Augustinian friar who was the guide’s ostensible early 15th-century author as the early 16th-century editor of Luigi Macchiavelli’s work. Carlo Antonio Macchiavelli published a Catalogue of the Authors and Materials Regarding the Conforteria in 1729 to further cover their tracks, but the frauds were denounced by Giovanni Fantuzzi in 1786 and further demolished by Luigi Frati in 1856.26 The stakes at play were sufficiently 24 25 26 Ditchfield, Liturgy, sanctity and history. Gazzini, “Gli archivi delle confraternite,” pp. 384-85. Fanti, “La Confraternita di Santa Maria della Morte,” pp. 126-31. Fanti notes the forgeries, and then goes on to a careful explication of the text’s authorship. For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV Confraternities and Civil Society 403 high, and the importance of the archive as the reliquary of a bureaucratic state was well enough established, that researchers must be alert to the possibilities of such holy frauds. The early modern sensibility that saw the archive as historical source was a move beyond the medieval and Renaissance one of seeing it only as administrative deposit, yet the one did not replace the other. Financial and legal records retained their practical function, and Alessandro Pastore has shown the problems of reporting and tampering that make some of them suspect, and noted the questions which have to be posed of them.27 In many confraternities, and particularly the larger, wealthier, charitable, and ennobled ones, 17th- and 18th-century officials re-ordered their archives to make the records more accessible. They prepared multi-volume series of alphabetical and chronological sommarii and repertorii documenting centuries of legal records, and these served as convenient finding aids to the thousands of original documents filed in dozens or hundreds of cardboard buste. It would certainly be easy to slip in the occasional fraudulent indulgence, privilege, or bolla, though in most cases those hard at work re-organizing confraternal records had more immediate and practical goals. In many cases the manuscript catalogues of legal documents followed by a few decades on earlier catalogues of real estate holdings that used maps, plans, and elevations to record the confraternity’s property and income.28 Confraternities were determined to get a firmer grip on what they owned, and on what was owed them. In most cases, repertorii and buste are full of documents relevant to purchases and sales, for property-based loans and investments like francazione and censi, of legacies, and for extended lawsuits concerning all of the above. The more ambitious confraternities kept records of those wills which promised a house or farm should an heir or series of heirs die out, and the more accurate their records, the more possible it would be to go to court and lay claim to these legacies decades later. The ambitious effort to record and archive property records was certainly practical and perhaps even predatory, and highlights just how wealthy and bureaucratic some early modern confraternities had become. Yet it also 27 28 Pastore, “Usi ed abusi,” pp. 17-40. An early example is the 1601 Campione produced for Santa Maria della Vita: ASB, Fondo Ospedale, Santa Maria della Vita 10/14. The Senate commissioned a similar illustrated inventory of the holdings of the Abbey of Santi Naborre e Felice, granted to the city by Julius II, in order to support its claim to the properties: the gold-embossed leather volume of elevations and plans carries civic markers on the cover: ASB, Fondo Demaniale, Abbazia di Santi Naborre e Felice 116/2037. For a published version of the rural survey of properties belonging to the confraternal Opera Pia dei Poveri Vergognosi, see Righini, Antiche mappe bolognesi. For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV 404 Terpstra reflected an expanding early modern literary and historical sensibility. Some officials and archivists wished to reinforce what they considered to be their lay group’s particular privileges from clerical or commercial threat. Others simply aimed to organize and make available the more discursive or narrative accounts of the confraternity’s life and activities. Gazzini notes that many of the ambitious projects to re-organize confraternal archives in the later 17th and early 18th centuries were driven by officials who recognized that the records in their care were important not only for their group’s legal and financial life, but also for their city’s historical and cultural life. Some of these officials were themselves amateur historians who busied themselves over the decades in recording and copying documents that they came across in the various offices they held over the years. Their copies of whole manuscripts or collections of ephemera – including items relating to confraternities – were then sometimes given to the communal or university archive on their deaths, and in many cases the originals have since disappeared and only these copies remain. Statutes are the most common narrative manuscripts in confraternal deposits that directly convey social and spiritual expectations. These governed groups’ administrative, charitable, and cultic life, and the archivists who originally organized the various Archivio di Stato di Bologna fondi usually put them as the first items within any group’s inventory entry. Studied in isolation, statutes can have an abstract idealism and numbing predictability. Compared across time, space, and distinct communities, they can reveal more about how rituals evolved, how administrative conventions differed, what membership meant, and what different communities did to help their sick, dying, or dead.29 Successive statutes within a particular group usually mark periodic reform movements, particularly when accompanied by matriculation lists, and comparing them across the city can highlight broader spiritual movements not marked in the chronicles by major processions. We can trace an Observant revival spreading across the city in the 1440s and 50s by the sudden surge of reform and stretta statutes. Similarly, the impact of post-Tridentine reforms is often traceable first in the addenda tacked onto many statutes in the 1570s to 1590s, before they appear as new statutes altogether. In general, 14th-and 15th -century groups varied widely in what they required and offered, but almost all had relatively short sets of statutes that set out administrative conventions borrowed from other confraternities or from guilds. From the point of view of civil society, it is worth comparing these together in order to see how much they adopt the language and ideas from the other kinship groups (including guilds) in Bologna or neighboring cities, and 29 For a comparison of statutes in Bologna: Terpstra, Lay Confraternities, pp. 50-68. For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV Confraternities and Civil Society 405 how these gradually shift. Many of the more observant stretta groups established within confraternities borrowed regulations, rituals, and even wording from each other, and the close parallels suggest that the members and priests of separate groups talked a great deal together.30 By the early 16th century, statutes start getting longer and longer. The rules and requirements are certainly accumulating, with a greater effort to regulate both individual and collective behavior. Cristoforo Pensabene, fresh out of university legal studies and an inquisitorial grilling, and poised for a rapid ascent through the local ecclesiastical hierarchy, wrote a lengthy set of statutes for the conforteria of Santa Maria della Morte in 1556.31 These were short on pastoral reflection about the conforteria’s work of comforting prisoners condemned to death, and long on rules for organizing the group’s work and disciplining its members. Pensabene was a lawyer, after all. Yet other contemporary statutes started taking on the character of reflective and explanatory discursive spiritual texts. Longer prefaces gave the origin and history of the group, and longer chapters expanded on the spiritual meaning of administrative conventions or mutual obligations. By the mid-16th century, more of the sets of statutes are appearing as typeset octavo pamphlets rather than illuminated vellum manuscripts, suggesting that members now had personal copies that they could use as a kind of personal spiritual literature. The richest deposits of confraternal records in Bologna are held in four deposits in the Archivio di Stato: the Fondo Demaniale, the Fondo Ospedale, the Fondo dei Pii Istituti Educativi, and the Fondo Giovanni XXIII. The Demaniale was created together with the Archivio di Stato di Bologna itself to house all the records of monasteries, convents, and confraternities that had been suppressed under the Cisalpine Republic, and to make these available publicly in order to demonstrate the perfidy of the Catholic Church and its institutions. The deposits for confraternities are almost entirely administrative, and it can take some time and skill to see the social and spiritual life of the world that they describe. Moreover, those assembling later archives took the documents and organized them according to their late 18th-century location, sometimes obscuring a group’s history as a result. 30 31 See the 11 sets of confraternal statutes brought together for Modena, in which a number of the 15th-century observant statutes share passages with Bolognese groups. Al Kalak and Lucchi, Gli Statuti delle confraternite modenesi. A doctor of civil and canon law and canon of the civic basilica of San Petronio, Pensabene served both on the anziani (1548, 1564) and the gonfalonieri (renamed the tribuni del popolo, in 1555) before becoming chief financial officer of the Bolognese tribunal of the Holy Office (1561), and then Vicar General of Bologna (1566). Terpstra, “Theory into Practice,” pp. 144-48. For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV 406 Terpstra Deposits for the influential Compagnia di Santa Maria del Baraccano provide an example of the content, ordering, and dispersal of a wealthy and very active confraternity’s documentary traces. The bulk of documents – over 560 items – for the confraternity and its hostel-cum-conservatory are in the Archivio di Stato di Bologna fondo Archivio dei Pii Istituti Educativi. These are held in 20 distinct series whose organization underscores their administrative “deposit” function, running from statutes and minute books through collections of legal documents (for legacies, sales, and purchases, etc.) reinforced by their catalogues and on to financial registers.32 Records in the Archivio di Stato di Bologna fondo Archivio dei Pii Istituti Educativi deposit deal primarily with the charitable hostel-conservatory and the larga company that ran it. A separate deposit of ten items in the Fondo Demaniale contains the stretta company’s statutes, legal documents, registers, and summaries, lawsuits, minute books, and other miscellanea. Outside the Archivio di Stato, we find an early and original statute book (1439) in the Biblioteca Comunale, while the Archivio Arcivescovile holds copies of pastoral visits, records of legacies, miscellaneous administrative materials, minutes, and inventories (from the 17th and above all the 18th centuries), adjudication of internal disputes, and statutes.33 The Baraccano’s records are spread across the city and, while there is some logic to what can be found where, each deposit holds unexpected items that later archivists often filed as “Miscellanea.” Yet these institutional documents tell only part of a story which must be contextualized with a far broader range of civic, religious, and literary sources. And that entails a hunt. We know that a great deal has been lost, but simply do not know what. As noted above, some sources suggest that Compagnia della Carità was the largest confraternity in 1570s Bologna, with 2500 members paying into its advanced system of social insurance. Yet no matriculation lists, financial records, or administrative documents survive for this period, and we have no way of knowing whether they were lost, destroyed, or simply never kept. We know of 32 33 The series are: A. Statutes; B. Files (miscellaneous materials); C. Minutes of the administrative Congregation; D. Legal Instruments & Documents; E. Catalogue of Instruments; F. Legal Processes; G. Miscellanea; H. Legacies; I. Administrative Papers; J. Financial Registers – Summaries (Mastri); K. Financial Registers – Daybooks (Giornali); L. Financial Registers of the Confraternity; M. Financial Registers of the Urban Properties; N. Financial Registers of the Farms; O. Book-keeping (contabilita); P. Balance Sheets (Bilanci); Q. Book-Keeping; R. Maps and Elevations; S. Registers and Summaries Legal Instruments. The most effective guide to the archival inventories of Bologna’s charitable institutions (most of them confraternally-run) is Fanti, Gli archivi. For Santa Maria del Baraccano: pp. 68-72. For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV Confraternities and Civil Society 407 the confraternity’s size and ambitious insurance plan from the complaints of episcopal visitors who thought that confraternal funds ought to be going instead for religious furnishings and services; the records do indeed pick up from the 1620s when the more elite membership did precisely this, leaving the question of whether these members decided to remove all documentary traces of the period when the Company was under suspicion and under discipline. Later efforts to invent traditions, “correct” documents, or otherwise shape history means that it is unwise to take any documents at face value in the stories that they tell. What is said or left unsaid with regard to the role of women highlights this most clearly, and can be a cautionary guide to how we should read and use these records. Among early documents, both narrative and administrative, it is necessary to read between the lines to find what contemporaries assumed and what they thought was not worth recording. We know that 14th-century laudesi confraternities typically recruited equal numbers of men and women, though no statutes prescribe this or assign women a major administrative role. Yet while statutes may suggest that female members had little if any administrative role, careful examination of financial records sometimes reveals their leading role in communal social activities, particularly in the case of hospitals. As we move to the 15th and 16th century, it becomes necessary to read documents carefully in order to tease out misogynistic rhetorical tropes and determine the control strategies that they may have been hiding. Condemnations of women as weak temptresses were a common trope in the statutes of observant stretta groups, and justified their exclusion from the confraternal community. The statute prefaces for Santa Maria della Pietà (1547) and San Giuseppe (1641) state that female members themselves sought male help because they could not deal with the challenge of running a group. Yet here again, a closer look at the financial records of the latter shows that it was far more stable and successful before the men took over, and its finances collapsed after they assumed administrative direction.34 In the end, civil society as practiced was distinct from civil society as recorded. The visibility or invisibility of women, both in the records and in civic religious life of the city, underscores this. It highlights social changes, and it underscores gaps between rhetoric and reality in how records were created and how they were saved. Likewise civic religion, and above all the strong element of lay agency as it was expressed through confraternities, often gets lost thanks to the ways in which religion was later professionalized and cleri34 ASB, Demaniale, Santa Maria della Pietà 10/7696, Filza 3; ASB, Archivio dei Pii Istituti Educativi, San Giuseppe 1, Libro +, pp. 1-4; Terpstra, Lay Confraternities, pp. 116-32, Terpstra, Abandoned Children, pp. 239-41. For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV 408 Terpstra calized, and how archives were pruned and organized from the later 16th century. Retracing both the social changes and the archival practices of the early modern period helps us understand how easy it was to obscure two vital elements of gender and laity in the civic religion and civil society in the late medieval and Renaissance period. Bibliography Primary Sources Masini, Antonio di Paolo, Bologna Perlustrata, 2 vols. (Bologna, 1666). Secondary Sources Al Kalak, Matteo and Marta Lucchi (eds.), Gli Statuti delle confraternite modenesi dal X al XVI secolo (Bologna, 2011). Blanshei, Sarah Rubin, “Habitus. Identity and the Formation of Hereditary Classes in late Medieval Bologna,” in Gian Mario Anselmi, Angela De Benedictis and Nicholas Terpstra (eds.), Bologna. Cultural Crossroads from the Medieval to the Baroque. Recent Anglo-American Scholarship (Bologna, 2013), pp. 143-57. Carboni, Mauro, “Public Debt, Guarantees, and Local Elites in the Papal States,” Journal of European Economic History 36 (2009), 135-59. De Benedictis, Angela, Repubblica per contratto. Bologna. Una città europea nello Stato della Chiesa (Bologna, 1995). Ditchfield, Simon, Liturgy, sanctity and history in Tridentine Italy. Pietro Maria Campi and the preservation of the particular (Cambridge, Eng., 1995). Eckstein, Nicholas and Nicholas Terpstra (eds.), Sociability and its Discontents. Civil Society, Social Capital, and their Alternatives in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Turnhout, 2009). Fanti, Mario (ed.), Gli archivi delle Istituzioni di carità e assistenza attive in Bologna nel Medioevo e nell’Età Moderna. Atti del 4⁰ Colloquio ‘Forme e soggetti dell’intervento assistenziale in una città d’antico regime.’ Bologna, 20-21 gennaio 1984 (Bologna, 1984). Fanti, Mario (ed.), Confraternite e città a Bologna nel medioevo e nell’età moderna (Rome, 2001). Fanti, Mario, “Confraternite e istituzioni di assistenza a Bologna (secoli XIII-XVIII),” in Adriano Prosperi (ed.), Storia di Bologna. 3. Bologna nell’Età Moderna, 2 vols. (Bologna, 2008), vol. 2 pp. 1213-66. Fanti, Mario, “La chiesa e la Compagnia dei Poveri in Bologna. Una istituzione di mutuo soccorso nella societa Bolognese fra il Cinquecento e il Seicento,” in Fanti, Confraternite e città, pp. 175-304. For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV Confraternities and Civil Society 409 Fanti, Mario, “La Confraternita di Santa Maria della Morte e la Conforteria dei condannati a Bologna nei secoli XIV e XV,” in Fanti, Confraternite e città, pp. 61-73. Fasoli, Gina, “Bologna nell’età medievale (1115-1506),” in Antonio Ferri and Giancarlo Roversi (eds.), Storia di Bologna (Bologna, 1978; reprint 1996). Gazzini, Marina, “Gli archivi delle confraternite. Documentazione, prassi conservative, memoria communitaria,” in Marina Gazzini (ed.), Studi confraternali. Orientamenti, problemi, testimonianze (Florence, 2009), pp. 369-90. Gazzini, Marina, Confraternite e societa cittadina nel mediovo italiano (Bologna, 2006). Guenzi, Alberto, “Politica ed economia,” in Adriano Prosperi (ed.), Storia di Bologna. 3. Bologna nell’Età Moderna, 2 vols. (Bologna, 2008), vol. 1, pp. 335-66. Johnson, Sherri Franks, Monastic Women and Religious Orders in Late Medieval Bologna (Cambridge, Eng., 2014). Lecuppre-Desjardin, Elodie and Anne-Laure van Bruaene (eds.), De bono communi. The Discourse and Practice of the Common Good in the European City (13th-16th Centuries) (Turnhout, 2010). Monson, Craig, Disembodied Voices. Music and Culture in Early Modern Convents (Berkeley, 1995). Monson, Craig, Nuns Behaving Badly. Tales of Music, Magic, Art, and Arson in the Convents of Italy (Chicago, 2010). Pastore, Alessandro, “Usi ed abusi nella gestione delle risorse (secoli XVI-XVII),” in Marina Garbellotti and Alessandro Pastore (eds.), L’uso del denaro. Patrimoni e amministrazione nei luoghi pii e negli enti ecclesiastici in Italia (secoli XV-XVIII) (Bologna, 2001), pp. 17-40. Prodi, Paolo, Il Cardinale Gabriele Paleotti, 2 vols. (Rome, 1967). Righini, Davide, Antiche mappe bolognesi. Le piante dei beni rurali dell’Opera Pia dei Poveri Vergognosi (Bologna, 2001). Robertson, Ian, Tyranny under the Mantle of St. Peter. Pope Paul II and Bologna (Turnhout, 2002). Rousakis, Anna Beth, “From Image of Devotion to Devotional Image. The Changing Role of Art in the Chapel of the Arciconfraternita della Madonna della Consolazione, detta della Cintura,” in Christopher Black and Pamela Gravestock (eds.), Early Modern Confraternities in Europe and the Americas (Aldershot, 2006), pp. 112-28. Terpstra, Nicholas, Abandoned Children of the Italian Renaissance. Orphan Care in Florence and Bologna (Baltimore, MD, 2005). Terpstra, Nicholas, Cultures of Charity. Women, Politics, and the Reform of Poor Relief in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge, MA, 2013). Terpstra, Nicholas, Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion in Renaissance Bologna (Cambridge, Eng., 1995). For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV 410 Terpstra Terpstra, Nicholas, “Theory into Practice. Executions, Comforting, and Comforters in Renaissance Italy,” in Nicholas Terpstra (ed.), The Art of Executing Well. Rituals of Execution in Renaissance Italy (Kirksville, MO, 2008), pp. 118-58. Zanni Rosiello, Isabella, “L’Archivio, memoria della città,” in Adriano Prosperi (ed.), Storia di Bologna. 3. Bologna nell’Età Moderna, 2 vols. (Bologna, 2008), vol. 1, pp. 41345. Zarri, Gabriella, “Chiesa, religione, società (secoli XV-XVIII),” in Adriano Prosperi (ed), Storia di Bologna. 3. Bologna nell’Età Moderna, 2 vols. (Bologna, 2008), vol. 2, pp. 8851004. For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV