SESSION 6
Material Cultures of Belief: The Scuole of Venice Primary Source Readings Chambers, David, and Brian Pullan. “The General Situation.” In Venice: A Documentary History 1450-1630, 297-306. Oxford: Blackwell 1992.
Secondary Source Readings Pullan, Brian. “The Scuole Grandi of Venice: Some further thoughts.” In Christianity and the Renaissance: Image and Religious Imagination in the Quattrocento, edited by T. Verdon and J. Henderson, 272-301. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990. Weissman, Ronald. “Cults and Contexts: In search of the Renaissance Confraternity.” In Crossing the Boundaries: Christian Piety and the Arts in Italian Medieval and Renaissance Confraternities, edited by Konrad Eisenbichler, 201-220. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 1991.
Further Readings D'Andrea, David. “Charity and Confraternities.” In A Companion to Venetian History 1400-1797, edited by E. Dursteler, 421-448. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Terpstra, Nicholas, and Richard Mackenney. The Politics of Ritual Kinship: Confraternities and Social Order in Early Modern Italy. Cambridge, United Kingdom:Cambridge University Press, 2000.
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Sohm, Philip L. The Scuola Grande di San Marco 1437-1550: The Architecture of a Venetian Lay Confraternity. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc, 1982. Pullan, Brian. Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice: The Social Institutions of a Catholic State to 1620. Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press, 1971. Humfrey, Peter. “Competitive Devotions: The Venetian Scuole Piccoleas Donors of Altarpieces in the Years around 1500.” The Art Bulletin. College Art Association. 1988. Mackenney, Richard. “Continuity and Change in the Scuole Piccole of Venice.” Renaissance Studies 8 (1994): 388-403. Mackenney, Richard. “Devotional Confraternities in Renaissance Venice.” Studies in Church History 23 (1986): 85-96. Mackenney, Richard. “The scuole piccole of Venice: Formations and Transformations.” In The Politics of Ritual Kinship: Confraternities and Social Order in Early Modern Italy, edited by Nicholas Terpstra, 172-89. Cambridge, 2000.
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READING 1
Charity in Renaissance Venice In all probability at least two thirds of the population of Venice lacked reserves or savings and risked becoming, at some point in their lives, dependent on charity – on the tiny donations of casual almsgivers, on the ampler bounty of institutions, or on parish relief. Densely populated by widows and young children, the ranks of the poor were swelled by unfortunate persons from every social order. VII.1 and 2 are factual descriptions by foreign observers of the more systematic charities that served the Venetians about 1500, especially religious brotherhoods and hospitals – a term that included places of shelter and elementary education as well as establishments for the care of the sick. The varied functions of the great fraternities called the Scuole Grandi, and the tensions created by the rival demands of charity, ceremony and display, have already been described (V12 and 13); here Battista Sfornitalo, the Milanese envoy, concentrates on their methods of relieving the poverty of their less fortunate members. VII.3 gives the text of the comprehensive poor law of 1529, the Venetian contribution to the many schemes that were being devised between about 1520 and 1560, in most parts of Western Europe and especially by cities, to assist the deserving poor and expel or punish the fraudulent. This law established, in broad outline, the state's official approach to poor relief and its official classifications of the poor for the remainder of the sixteenth century; it attempted to establish a system of ‘voluntary’ parochial relief to supplement the efforts of charitable brotherhoods and hospitals and to introduce one of forced labour for the idle and fraudulent poor. VII.4-7 record details of the aims, educational activities, administration, fund-raising devices and financial problems of some of Venice’s principal hospitals. VII.7, in particular, attempts to establish the division of labour between them. All the great hospitals, other than the Pielu, were sixteenth- century foundations, established in response to particular crises: the Incurabili to the syphilis epidemic of the Italian wars. Santi Giovanni e Paolo to the great famines of the late 1520s, the Mendicanti to those of the early 1590s. These 'documents reflect, especially, the problems of the chronically sick and infectious, of the very young, and of the aged, the homeless and the feeble-minded. Concerned both with the care of sickness and with the protection and education of children, hospitals were managed by congregations of governors, laymen of high 714
social standing (VII,5[b]), to whom their officials were made responsible. There was a difference in principle between the foundlings of the Pietà (whether bastards or not) who had been abandoned by a living parent or parents out of shame or poverty, and the orphans of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, who were in principle children of legitimate birth, separated from parents by death. By the eighteenth century the children of the Pietà, the Incurabili, Santi Giovanni e Paolo and the Mendicanti were all more famous for their splendid choirs and orchestras than for the more mundane forms of manual labour for which [VII.6] most of their children had been trained. VII.6(c), from the 1570s, offers a small early hint of the importance of singing. VII.8-10 are concerned not with the inmates of institutions, but with the much larger body of the house poor of Venice: those who clung precariously to their own lodgings in imminent danger of eviction for arrears of rent, or in hopeless embarrassment when called upon to produce a lump sum to endow a nubile daughter who might otherwise go to the bad. These were the ‘shamefaced poor' or poveri vergognosi of Venice, ranging from the abject decayed nobles described above by Bedmar [VS. j] to respectable shopkeepers or craftsmen fallen on hard times and to their widows and children. They shrank from openly begging on bridges or in churches, but were often found [VII. 9] pleading for assistance from the officers of their religious brotherhoods in the formal language of a petitioner-doubtless with assistance from a clerk or notary who knew the form. All the Scuole Grandi [Vll.8 and 9] assisted the 'shamefaced poor’ among their own members, but a society which concentrated on outsiders the Fraternity of San’ Antonino, was established in 1557. Unlike the Scuole Grandi, it was solely concerned with poor relief, upholding the laws against begging by seeking to make begging unnecessary. Its activities at the close of the sixteenth century are described in VII.10. Bibliography – In general: Pullan 1971, 19 78, 1988b; Mueller1972; Semi 1983; Vanzan-Marchini 1985; Aikema and Meijers 1989. On the Pietà: Cecchetti1885. On orphans: Arte 1978; Constable 1988. On almshouses and the housing of the poor, Pavanini 1981; Gianighian and Pavanini 1984; Concina 1989, pp. 73-104. for studies of religious brotherhoods see the bibliography preceding V.ii.
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THE CHARITIES OF VENICE, 1497 Letter of Battista Sfondrato, Milanese ambassador in Venice, to Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, 23 March 1497: Archivio di Stato Milan, Archivio ducale Visconteo- Sforzesco, Carteggio, Potenze Estere, Venezia, cart. 1062, ff. 89-92 (letter as sent), 188-9 (rough draft). My Most Illustrious and Excellent Lord, You wrote to me recently, asking me to inform you whether in this city [of Venice] there are charitable institutions such as hospitals, confraternities [schole] and the like, as there are in Milan, and to write to you concerning their quantity and quality and how they spend their incomes. I have applied myself diligently to meeting your request; although it is difficult to understand the situation in detail, I shall not fail to describe it in those general terms which are really almost all that we can know and understand. In this city there is no famous hospital like that of Milan, but only a few years ago a hospital was begun whose founder was Fra Michele da Carcano. This will be quite beautiful when it is finished; but so far only one section has been furnished, and the rest is incomplete. It has as yet no income whatsoever, and hence it is not used except to provide a room to the occasional person of status who falls upon hard times. I believe, however, that, with the alms they will collect annually as a result of the indulgence which has been granted them, the institution can be turned into an honourable one.1 The best things that Venice has, then, are four famous Scuole Grandi belonging to confraternities or companies of flagellants, such as there are in Milan. In Venice they go in procession, clad in a gown of white wool and with a hood in the manner of a friar; on their breasts is a red symbol which distinguishes one Scuola from another, while each Scuola, especially of the four principal ones, also carries candles of a different colour.2 They are entitled as follows. First is the CaritĂ , with an income of about 4000 ducats; the second is the Misericordia, with some 3000 ducats; the third is San Giovanni [Evangelista], with over 2000 ducats; the fourth is San Marco, with little more than 800 ducats. There is another, San Rocco, 716
which so far has no income whatsoever, even though it is nearly of the same size as the other four, and in time will surely not be inferior to the others. Each of these five Scuole has 700 members, most of whom are non-noble citizens [populari], artisans and boatmen; there are also nobles, but they hold no rank in them. The revenues are spent in part on decorating the Scuole, all of which have elaborate and gilded ceilings, and are now becoming more imposing than ever: their buildings are being embellished with faรงades or marble and stone of great value. Some of the revenues are spent on die many religious services that they perform continuously, where they dispense innumerable candles; and the balance is spent on helping members of each Scuola. Each one has a regular membership of 700. There are always many infirm among them, who are cared for, fed and clothed, along with their families, until they get well or die. After the death of a member, another person is chosen in his place and is similarly cared for On the other hand, the Scuola recognizes no obligation toward the survivors of the dead man, who are treated as though they had never been connected with the Scuola, with a single exception: marriageable daughters of the deceased are provided for in the same manner, year in and year out, as the daughters of living members who marry. Otherwise, the survivors of the deceased receive no aid, even if they are in great need. Since the revenues of the Scuole are insufficient to meet their obligations towards the poor, the sick, and the girls in need of dowries, it is a custom that those members who are healthy and successful in their occupations should give alms each month. This practice brings considerable returns, and permits the Scuola to meet most of the obligations mentioned above. Besides almsgiving, many people make bequests by leaving all or part of their patrimony to the Scuole, and make the Scuole trustees for the distribution of these legacies. Connected with each Scuola Grande and attached to it is a house rather like a special hospital, where sick members are brought and cared for when they are not better off in their own homes. These hospitals have no revenues of their own, but are just branches and receptacles of the Scuole. So much for the four Scuole Grandi. The fifth Scuola [San Rocco], which I have called Grande as much as the others but which has no income, meets the same obligations as the other Scuole, as much 717
as it can, solely with the alms given by members and with a few bequests; however, for lack of regular income, it cannot match the others, so that it does not spend in all more than 1000 ducats a year. Besides the Scuole Grandi there are many small private Scuole which have little or no revenue, but which, by drawing on the alms they collect, spend annually some 600, 500 or 300 ducats, more or less. Each provides solely for its own members, who never complain about giving alms, and do so generously many times each year, since they know that the aid provided by the Scuola is mutual, and it is as though each were helping himself. For each member who helps a needy brother knows that he too will be aided when he can no longer care for himself and falls on hard times. Apart from these Scuole, which have names such as La Trinità, La Divinità, and the like, there are also private Scuole for each nation, which have some secure incomes, and Scuole for each craft and trade, all of which support some poor. In other words, the Scuola of each nation aids the poor of that nation (albeit not all of them), within the limits of its revenues; similarly, the Scuole of the crafts sustain their own artisans. Even though these Scuole do not relieve the misery of all the poor who can be found here, they do assist a great many of them. There are some other special hospitals, situated in certain parishes of this city, at a considerable distance one from the other, which have very little income, if any; but they too are attached to some ancient church and they lend assistance to the very poor of that parish. There is one institution, called the Pietà, which supports little base-born children [li puti picoli bastardi]; it has no income except for what is provided by alms and by the Procurators of St Mark’s. There is a hospital which resembles the others in being connected with a church, in this case San Pietro.3 Here they bring those who have lost one or more limbs by judicial mutilation and who therefore cannot help themselves or earn a living such cases are cared for until death. This is as much as I can relate to Your Excellency concerning these charitable institutions. Although there are many of them, the number of the poor of ah conditions who are found here is much greater, and they still seem not to be well 718
provided for, despite all the opportunities that exist. The reason for this seems to be that none of the Scuole, and especially not the Scuole Grandi, which give more in aid than the others, admit members without an entrance fee of 10 or 12 ducats, or something similar. Thus he who cannot help himself finds himself without help. Many alms are given, and many goods are distributed regularly for charitable causes, by the Procuracy of St Mark’s, according to the wishes of deceased persons who name the office of the Procurators of St Mark’s as trustees and executors of their testaments. I commend myself humbly, as always, to Your Excellency. Venice, 23 March 1497 Your most loyal servant, Battista Sfondrato [Addressed on reverse] To the Most Illustrious Prince and Most Excellent Lord, the Lord Duke of Milan, with my respects. 1. The hospital of Gesù Cristo di Sant’Antonio. 2. This sentence appears only in the draft reply, and not in the final version. 3. The hospital of San Pietro e San Paolo in Castello; see Semi 1983, pp. 78-82.
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The Hospitals of Venice, c. 1500 From the French. Extracts from Anon., Description ou traictie du government ou regime de la cite et seigneurie de Venise, ch. iv: BN Fonds Francis 5599, ff. 14v-16r. First of all, in Venice there is a hospital [maison] called the Pietà, which accepts children not born of legal marriage whose parents do not wish to rear them. These small children are fed and provided for from the revenues and alms of this hospital until they are able to learn a trade or become servants - that is, the boys; the girls are cared for until they find husbands or secure some other honest livelihood [manière de urtre). Item. There is another large hospital outside the city, at a League’s distance front it, called Nazareth which receives all those who are stricken with the plague [malade d’epydimye], and they remain there until they recover or die. There is an administrator in charge of these sick persons, of expenditure, and of other necessary matters. There are also chaplains, physicians and surgeons, apothecaries and other staff and servants necessary for caring for the bodies and souls of these sick persons, both in death and in life. There is another hospital, distant about a league and a half from the former, which is large and beautiful and in a pleasant spot, and is called New Nazareth.5 There they bring those who have recovered from the said illness, so that they do not return directly to the city and infect others; and they remain there for two months, or [at least] for the course of two moons. All those, moreover, who have come into contact with these sick persons are sent to this place, where they reside for the same period of two moons. If any of them should fall sick of the plague during this period, they are sent to the first Nazareth, called Old Nazareth. And for this purpose many boats and boatmen [gens propres] are provided to transport them; these men are hired to take the healthy, the sick and the dead back and forth where necessary. Should anyone die of plague in the city, he is brought for burial to Old Nazareth. At New Nazareth, too, there is an administrator in charge of making expenditure for those who are brought to this place, who own nothing at all from which to provide for themselves; and there are also other officers 720
necessary to it. . . . Nearly all the said expenditure is of government money, since the hospitals themselves have very little revenue. Item. In Venice there are many other hospitals, both for men and for women, to the number of about forty; and the poor who live in them are amply provided with food and clothing from the revenues of these hospitals, some of which are middle-sized and others small. But another hospital has been begun which will be perfect: it will be so beautiful and grand that in all Italy there will be none or few to surpass it.6 4. The Lazzaretto Vecchio, founded in 1423. Its name derived from the convent of Santa Maria di Nazareth, which it took over. 5. The Lazzaretto Nuovo, founded in 1468 [see above, III.s(a)(ii)]. 6. The hospital of GesÚ Cristo di Sant’Antonio.
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The General Scheme for Poor Relief, 1529 Senate decree of 3 April 1529: ASV Senato, Terra, reg. for 1529, ff. I25v-i27r. (Documenti 1879, p. cccxiii). Charity is, without any doubt, to be considered the most important form of good work, and it must always be practised towards our neighbours. As is everyone’s duty, we must look to the interests of the poor and the health of the sick and offer food to the hungry; and never should we fail to extend our aid and favour to those who can earn their bread in the sweat of their brow. These things we must do in order to please our supreme and almighty God, who will bring to perfection every well-conceived and well-intentioned undertaking; in order to root out a wicked custom and an evil way of life, in the form of begging and cheating, to which so many people resort in this noble city, bringing some notoriety to Venice; and in order to enhance the good name of this well-ordered Republic. We must neglect no method of promoting such an important enterprise. Therefore, that the poor of the city may be able to get their living both by their own efforts and by the means made available to them, and that the sick may be cared for and fed, and that those who wish to practise the trades of the beggar and the cheat may be expelled from this city, let us adopt the following measures, which shall be arranged below under headings and specified in detail. First, the beggars from outside who daily enter the city shall be sent back to their own territories with letters of commendation exhorting the governors of those places to provide for their support, and not to allow them to return to Venice. Each of these people must be cared for in his own part of the country [patria], by the methods which seem to those responsible to be most appropriate to this task. The poor people of Venice who are driven by want, and who cannot live by their own industry or manual labour on account of infirmity, shall be placed in and distributed among the hospitals or wherever it seems they can best get support. This measure shall be applied to those persons of either sex who have no fixed abode.
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Those persons who are feeble [impotenti] and yet have a dwelling-place may on no account seek alms in the city. They must go or send to the priests in their parishes, who shall provide for their support by the methods described below. And, because there is another kind of men, who are robust and hardy and could well live by their own efforts, but instead devote themselves to the shameful and forbidden trade of fraudulent begging [furfantaria] and cannot be dissuaded from it, we do not wish them to be treated in this way. Rather, the masters of all vessels shall be invited to take on board whatever number of poor they choose, and they shall pay their expenses, as they do those of other sailors, and they shall give them half the normal pay. Likewise, the Provveditori sopra l’Armar and the paymasters shall be obliged to place on the light galleys and the fuste whatever number of poor persons may seem appropriate to them. As for the other poor who remain in this city and are not taken on board the ships (for perhaps they will be very numerous), measures shall be taken as follows to prevent them from going begging. All the bailiffs [gastaldi] and their colleagues and other officers of the brotherhoods of all the crafts shall be obliged to take them on, at the rate of three or four for each craft, causing them to learn the trade and providing them with victuals and wages according to need and as they judge best. There are also many women, widows and persons of other status, who have young children and cannot engage in the activities mentioned above, but who seek to make a living for themselves and their families by other kinds of labour. The parish priests and deputies must ensure that they have materials on which to exercise whatever skills they possess, and if they cannot live by this work they must be given alms to meet their needs, and this regulation shall apply to those who have no choice but to go begging or send others to beg for them. That this good work may progress more smoothly to a good end, and that the poor may be assisted, the most reverend Monsignor Patriarch and the Provveditori alla Sanità shall charge each parish priest that, together with the named and appointed deputies of the parish, he shall go throughout his district seeking alms from the well-to-do [potenti], and the money and the goods so given for the love 723
of God shall be distributed with care and diligence to the aforesaid poor of Christ who dwell in their parishes. The poor of the city must be divided and distributed among the parishes in such a way that each parish has a number of poor appropriate to its wealth and standing. Members of the brotherhoods of Corpus Domini shall be bound to perform the duty of assiduously commending the poor and exhorting all men to give alms, until this arrangement concerning the parishes has been placed on a firmer footing. Religious houses, hospitals, religious brotherhoods, prelates, procurators and others who have ample resources shall be urged and invited, either by the Provveditori alla SanitĂ or by other suitable persons, to assist the aforesaid poor, who are distributed among the parishes. They shall give such alms as they see fit to those appointed to deal with this matter. The preachers appointed to preach for the time being shall be charged warmly to urge the people and earnestly to exhort the well-to-do [potenti] to help the poor, and to encourage all suitable and proper persons to exert themselves and to promote the present ordinance concerning the poor. The parish priests and deputies shall present themselves once a month either to the most reverend Monsignor Patriarch or to the Provveditori alla SanitĂ , as they judge best, and there they shall report in detail on the progress of the business of Christ, so that they may be given any help they need. They must speak of the poor on every festival day in their churches and move and inspire the inhabitants of their parishes to assist them and give them alms. Every year the parish priests must assemble their parishioners, and then they shall elect by ballot two nobles, one citizen and one artisan, who shall be responsible for promoting the well-being of the poor, and, as far as may be, for preventing any offence to God in their parishes. They shall ensure that every year a voluntary tax is requested in their parish, and this tax shall be applied to the use of the poor, and accounts shall be kept both of its collection and of its dispensation, and it shall be distributed according to the needs of the poor in the parish. 724
The parish priests and the elected deputies shall see that the poor of their parishes are employed in those trades and crafts to which they are best suited and in which they are most skilled, and those who will not work at them as above shall be banished forever from Venice. No poor person may depart from one parish to go and reside in another without certificate from his parish priest, which must be presented to the priest of his new parish, so that such action may be taken concerning these persons who change places as the priest and deputies may judge best. In each parish there shall be placed a box for the support of the poor and the keys to it shall be kept by the parish priest, and deputies, and the alms which are found in the poor box must be spent solely upon the assistance of the poor. The priest and deputies shall be obliged to give a true and precise account of these alms and of any other collection or moneys which may be taken up for this purpose and of their distribution and the accounts must be reviewed annually by the Judges of the Palace, each one of whom shall be allocated accounts of one sestier, as the Provveditori alla Sanila shall judge best. The most reverend Monsignor Patriarch shall be requested to commend and recommend this godly ordinance for the assistance of the poor to the faithful of Christ when he goes on his visitation of the parishes, so that, having been well begun, this ordinance may produce good results. Every parish priest, on pain of a fine of 10 ducats to be distributed to the poor, must on every festival day at the time of the Gospel during High Mass remember to commend this new scheme. The Provveditori alla Sanita shall have in administering this ordinance the same authority as they have in matters concerning diseases, so that if new measures are required from day to day they may take whatever steps are needed. All abbesses of nunneries shall be exhorted to receive into their convents, if they have need of these girls, those poor and needy maidens of good an honourable life whom die parish deputies shall hand over to them, although the choice must be made by the said abbesses.
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The parish deputies shall scrutinize the accounts of the brotherhoods of Corpus Christi and other small religious companies and shall examine the administration of the moneys of the said brotherhoods, and if there is found to be a surplus then their bailiffs and their colleagues [li gastaldi et compagni] shall be exhorted to apply whatever sum they see fit to the use and maintenance of the parish poor. For the decree, 116; against, 34; uncertain, 49.
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READING 2
Brian Pullan The Scuole Grandi of Venice: Some Further Thoughts In this chapter Brian Pullan returns to the theme of his exhaustive study of nineteen years ago, in light of recent work by John Henderson, Ronald Weissman, and others. Through selective comparison with Florentine flagellant confraternities, Professor Pullan brings into sharp focus those aspects of confraternal life unique to another important Renaissance center, Venice: the distinctive dimensions of social prestige operative in an aristocratic society; the use made by the state of confraternities as a form of "civic religion;” and the philanthropic activities of Venetian confraternities. Professor Pullan clearly delineates the ceremonial, corporate, and public activities of the Venetian scuole, and contrasts these activities with the more individualistic and introspective spirituality entering Italy from beyond the Alps in the late fifteenth century. He clarifies the role of the confraternities in the context of the "old” and "local” Catholicism of the pre-Tridentine period, as distinguished from that sense of universal brotherhood, transcending city and regional loyalties, on the rise in the late quattrocento, that was to give its character to the Catholic reform movement of the sixteenth century. Brian Pullan is professor of history at the University of Manchester. He is best known for his monumental and innovative study, Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice: The Social Institutions of a Catholic State to 1620, published in 1971.
Reading one’s own work is a hard penance, doubly painful to the author who does this nineteen years after publication and twenty-five after starting research, kicking himself for the questions he failed to ask, for the implications and interconnections that he never perceived. When I began work on Venetian social history in 1959, I was excited by Wilbur Jordan’s researches on English philanthropy,1 and much influenced by the doctrine of il faut compter. Groping toward an account of the workings of charity and poor relief in a Catholic society of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, I was drawn into the history of six great brotherhoods, the Scuole Grandi, through a concern with only one of their activities, charity, which 727
was seemingly the most tangible and measurable. The fascination of their Mariegole or “Mother Rules” lured me almost reluctantly (after all, I was supposed to be a “modern” historian) back into the trecento and quattrocento. Writers on this subject nowadays would be better equipped: they would have at their disposal not only the excellent work of certain Venetian historians on closely related subjects but also a number of imaginative contributions made by scholars interested in other cities, and especially by historians of Florence. These works do not overturn my old, rather cautious, interpretation—nothing so dramatic as that but they have stimulated new thoughts on the distinctive, or at least unusual, features of the scuole. It is easier now to measure them both against other forms of confraternity that arose in Venice itself and against superficially similar types of brotherhood established in Florence, focusing attention principally on their relationship with society and the state. I should like to share these thoughts, and to start with a brief account of the rise of two new and contrasting cults in Venice, about the year 1480. From about 1478, a small group of ardent devotees promoted the cult of St. Roch or San Rocco in the city with such vigor and persistence that they could, in 1489, petition the Council of Ten for authority to expand the saint’s following to a full five hundred members and to claim the prestigious rank of a Scuola Grande. The prime movers were not native Venetians; one of them, no doubt, was Andrea da Bolzano, who served as guardian of the brotherhood in 1486.2 They formed part of the mass of transient foreigners and recent and seasonal immigrants who thronged Venice and far outnumbered the minority of patricians and native-born citizens at the heart of the state: most of their people are foreigners,” as Commynes would remark a few years later.3 But some had settled themselves and their wives and families within the city, and they were no doubt anxious to win a recognized place within a society slow to grant standing to newcomers. The term Scuole Grandi had been in use at least since 1467,4 when the Council of Ten had applied it to four large confraternities distinguished by the practice of ritual, public self-flagellation-brotherhoods embodying a tradition rooted in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. San Rocco’s Venetian followers made no attempt to create any new forms of worship or organization, and were 728
very likely urged to imitate older models by members of the older scuole who joined them.5 Their chances of winning recognition from the state would surely improve if they adhered to a tried and ancient formula, their chances of attracting recruits surely be brighter if they were permitted to order habits of the stuff used by the older brotherhoods.6 A Scuola Grande had to be a school of flagellants,7 but it seems unlikely that the brothers of San Rocco adopted the practice merely in order to earn promotion; in Venice it was still a bloody and public— and not merely a symbolic-nocturnal act. 8 Flagellation was not only a ritual commemoration of the Passion of Christ, to be performed with special fervor on Good Friday; it was also an act of placation or expiation, designed to allay the terrible penalties for sin inflicted on a whole people by the wrath of God. During an epidemic in 1447, barefooted penitential brotherhoods in Venice had chanted the hymn, Alto re della gloria Cazze via sta moria Per la vostra Passion Habiene misericordia. (High King of Glory, Drive away this pestilence; By your Cross and Passion, Lord, have mercy upon us),9 The cult of San Rocco and the rituals of the flagellants were, among much else, a spiritual complement to the long series of highly practical measures against the plague which were set in train a few years later, with the establishment of a permanent magistracy for the care of public health. Over the half century from 1478 to 1528, the pestilence was to recur at intervals of five or six years, and the city had desperate need of the protection afforded by both saints and living persons.10 Soon after 1480, the Dominican John of Erfurt, appointed chaplain to the community of German merchants and artisans in Venice, launched from the 729
remote convent of San Domenico di Castello a very different kind of confraternity. This was not to be a specifically Venetian brotherhood, but rather a Venetian branch of a universal fellowship, open (in the words of statutes imported from Germany) to “ all Christianity.” It would welcome everyone: “clerk and layman, rich and poor, man and woman,” and there would be no entrance fee or subscription, “lest on account of poverty or incapacity the poor should be excluded.” 11 In principle it would not even need to meet; the sole qualification for membership would be willingness to have one’s name inscribed on a register and to perform the essentially private devotion of reciting the Marian Psalter once every week, 150 Hail Marys, punctuated by an Our Father after each decade. Anyone so doing would be entitled to benefit from the entire store of merit accumulated by all members of the confraternity.12 This notion of confraternity contrasted squarely with that entertained by the Scuole Grandi, whose religious life focused on public ceremony and collective action, even though not all their members took part in all their rituals and processions. Though reasonably comprehensive in membership, the scuole assigned neither equal rank nor similar obligations to all their brothers, showed no sign of descending socially below the level of craftsmen and shopkeepers, and were accustomed to exact entrance fees and subscriptions. Numbers were limited, firmly in theory and sloppily in practice, by legislation of the Council of Ten.13 For centuries the Scuole Grandi had excluded women from membership unless it took the form of spiritual alliances or partnerships formed with communities of nuns. It would have been hard to require women to perform public rituals of selfflagellation, even though some nuns were known to use the discipline with great ardor within their cloisters.14 True, the difficulty was not insuperable, for the scuole were well acquainted with the practice of exempting certain categories of members-noblemen, clerics, physicians, and others-from the obligation to wield the scourge. But lay women could neither perform professional services nor bring prestige to the scuole Such things did not matter to the Confraternity of the Rosary. Indeed, statistics from Colmar in Alsace, where women accounted for some three-fifths of the first thousand persons to join this body, suggest the strength of its potential appeal to members of the excluded sex.15 730
It is tempting to see these different species of fraternity, one traditional and one innovative but both pursuing spiritual merit, as manifestations of two differing versions of Catholicism coexisting in Venice. One thinks of William Christian’s illuminating distinction between the Catholicism of the Church Universal and the Catholicism which has local roots and is founded on local shrines and local observances.16 Certainly, Venice was far removed from the agricultural towns and townlike villages of Spain, and the Scuole Grandi were in one respect neither local nor parochial. They promoted ceremonies and observances that cast their net across the entire city, and were concentrated neither on any one of the seventy parish churches nor on any one of the six regions known as the sestieri. Though they were not part of a universal fellowship, and were subordinated to no archconfratemity in Rome, their statutes were not peculiar to Venice and did ear a loose resemblance to those of other confraternities in other Italian cities; the influence of the mendicant friars was far-reaching enough to see to that. But their bonds with Venice, the city and the polity, were far more in evidence than were their links with Rome or the diocese or their affiliations to any religious order. One might almost speak of a Renaissance Catholicism” existing in close partnership with a city-state, striving to bring it prosperity and protection by adding to its store of merit and virtue and helping to curb and cancel its sins. It is true that, in the fifteenth century, there was not much actual tension between the kind of institution that turned inward toward Venice itself and the kind that, like the Confraternity of the Rosary, looked outward toward the universal Church. Clear contrasts were soon blurred. Before long, the Germans in Venice were demanding a more “visible” School of the Rosary of their own, and in subsequent years a conventional local scuola, dedicated to San Chiereghino in the church of San Simeone Profeta, was to impose on its brethren the task of saying the rosary and so to join the universal fellowship.18 But the Rosary did stand for a kind of individualistic and introspective piety alien to the Scuole Grandi, and its proponents did represent a kind of austerity easily repelled by Venetian excess. In the late fifteenth century, one Dominican Observant, Felix Faber of Ulm, an affectionate visitor to the religious house in Castello from which the new cult of the Marian Psalter was launched, robustly criticized the kind of opulent and 731
worldly piety represented by the Scuole Grandi in their less penitential moods. Omniscient God only knows,” he wrote after witnessing the splendors of Corpus Christi, “whether the most holy and divine sacrament accepted an honor presented in so worldly a manner.”19 Though internationally famous, exerting his power over different countries at various times, San Rocco could be called a specifically Venetian saint, in that his Venetian followers acquired his whole body by pious theft and proudly put it on display. It was not that the cult grew up around the relics; rather, it provided the incentive to obtain them, and in 1484 the officers contracted with a Benedictine and offered him 600 ducats for five items, the head, both hands, and both feet, with the possibility of adding the epitaph and other available properties. The Benedictine did even better, and the supposed body of the saint, removed from Voghera in the state of Milan, was certified as genuine in 1485 by the patriarch Maffeo Girardo.20 Here was a spectacular addition to the vast corpus of relics held in Venetian churches and scuole, which could be expected to earn divine protection for the city. Little boys in Feltre, a subject city, would later be instructed to pray “for our most illustrious overlords in Venice, that the Lord God by virtue of the numerous relics of holy bodies located in that city may uphold them in their gentle and generous power and prosperity, and defend them against all treachery, famine, pestilence and war, and from all adversity.”21 The body of San Rocco would prove a lucrative attraction to pilgrims — whether Jerusalem pilgrims waiting for a ship in May and visiting the churches and relics of Venice to pass the time profitably away, or people who had made a special journey to see it. 22 Devotion to a healer, and to a “specialist” saint of comparatively recent origin and recognition, was a new departure for the Scuole Grandi; the older ones were dedicated to the Virgin Mary and to saints of the New Testament-perhaps, through them, to all saints. In the early fourteenth century the Scuola della Misericordia had dedicated itself to the Virgin; to John the Baptist; to the apostles Peter, Paul, and Mark; and then to all saints, male and female, with a special obligation to kneel or genuflect when, in public processions, they passed the great door of St. Mark’s.23 As preachers of the Rosary doubtless reminded their 732
hearers, the Virgin was an immensely powerful protector, and to honor her through the recitation of the Marian Psalter would be to win a defense against “the fire of mischief, against lightning and thunder against brigands, thieves and murderers, and against all the assaults of enemies from Hell;” indeed, the renewal of the devotion, at some unspecified time between the death of the Virgin herself and the coming of St. Dominic, had put an end to a dreadful outbreak of pestilence.24 But San Rocco had the advantage of a more specific brief. When Master Johannes, the host of a cosy German inn near Rialto, died in 1483, and plague was suspected, his family fled in fear to Padua. But Felix Faber and his fellow-lodgers “ went to the church of San Rocco m the city of Venice, and there we invoked the aforesaid saint, who is the special helper of those who fear the pestilence, that they might not be infected.”25 San Rocco, who had himself suffered, had a special power because of his humanity; indeed, he was usually portrayed as having the boil on his thigh, as a symbol of the corruption and vulnerability of the flesh, less elegant but more poignant than the older protector against pestilence, St. Sebastian pierced with arrows. These qualities, and the presence of his bones in the city, may well have made him a fitting patron for a Scuola Grande. In most other respects, the Scuola di San Rocco was closely modeled on its older sister companies, and the preamble to its statutes echoes those of the Misericordia and San Giovanni Evangelista. There is not much evidence of radical change in the devotional practices of the Scuole Grandi of Venice during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Distrustful of an enthusiastic religious movement, the authorities had dispersed the White Penitents from Venice in the autumn of 1399,26 and the traditions of the scuole remained, in theory at least, those stemming from the demonstrations of 1260. Changes occurred, rather, in the social and economic structures of the scuole, as they were loaded with responsibility for administering perpetual trusts or commessarie di anima, and hence for managing the investments in government stock or house property which yielded those trusts a regular and continuing income.27 Almost inevitably, this development called for a division of the membership into an order of officeholders - literate, experienced, and sufficiently reputable to undertake these 733
administrative tasks - and an order of social inferiors, who were the most likely beneficiaries from the substantial resources of the confraternity. By the end of the fifteenth century, a kind of contract was being enforced, whereby only the poorer brothers were bound to perform the full range of the more arduous devotional duties, in return for the expectation and enjoyment of the more substantial benefits (which included rent-free housing and regular distributions of alms).28 Comparisons with Florentine flagellant brotherhoods may help to identify unusual characteristics of the Venetian scuole. Their Florentine counterparts were more volatile and, in their devotions, more receptive to innovation. According to John Henderson’s statistics, between 1240 and 1300, flagellant companies represented a mere 18 percent of the total number of brotherhoods in Florence, but by 1440-60, the proportion had risen to something like 40 percent. Their devotions began to adopt new forms and to focus on private and essentially symbolic rituals performed at night and in near darkness.29 Individual fraternities could change direction quite abruptly: the Compagnia de’ Magi at first devoted itself to magnificent pageantry for the honor of God and the fame of the city but ended its career as a very private and introverted company of flagellants which had turned to the discipline and the hearing of sermons.30 Ronald Weissman has interpreted the rituals of the Florentine night companies as a means of suspending normal social relationships, of briefly obliterating hierarchy and submerging it (if only overnight) beneath the anonymity of the hooded penitent expiating sin.31 But the Scuole Grandi, as the state demanded, reflected rather than canceled the social order. Normally deferential enough, they incurred the censure of the Council of Ten on one occasion when they took it upon themselves to define the financial terms on which noblemen might enter their ranks: it was not their business to dictate to the patriciate.32 Arrangements for exemptions, introduced during the fourteenth century, declared that noblemen were not to “ beat themselves;” indeed, certain young patricians were actually sentenced to imprisonment and exile by the Council of Ten for undergoing public flagellation in the church of Santa Maria Zobenigo on Good Friday 1438, an over-zealous act that not only violated public decency but also offended against privilege and threatened to bring their own rank into disrepute.33 734
Certain public ceremonies seemed designed to emphasize the status of noblemen within the great confraternities. Canon Pietro Casola, a Jerusalem pilgrim from Milan, described the splendid Corpus Christi procession of 1494, in which the plebeian members of the Scuole Grandi filed first past the host in its pyx on the high altar of St. Mark’s. The friars and clergy of the city followed, and thenclearly separated by these clerics from the rank and file-came a further cohort of sixty patricians. They wore togas, the everyday dress of most Venetians, and not the white overgarments of the ordinary penitents. But they announced their loyalties by carrying doppieri, heavy bundles of candles flaming like torches and molded in the different colors favored by the various Scuole Grandi, and the curious spectator was told that they were brethren of these schools.34 Consciousness of rank, so plainly proclaimed in the procession, may well have reflected the greater rigidity and formality of the Venetian social structure, with its legally defined and caste-like patriciate and its secondary privileged order of citizenry. As mentioned already, social differentiation was almost forced on the brothers by the responsibility of the scuole for large permanent endowments. Here, too, there was a striking contrast, for the more egalitarian flagellants of Florence displayed indifference, even hostility, to possessions. They left the great fortunes to be amassed by the laudesi companies; their charity was confined to personal almsgiving, offered first to their own brothers and then, should none prove to be in need, to deserving outsiders.33 In this the Scuole Grandi came closer to the penitential brotherhoods that later arose in Marseilles in the sixteenth century and, with their large reserves, backed the near dictatorship of the Catholic zealot Charles Casaulx.36 Relations between the brotherhoods and the state were more stable, less clouded by suspicion, in Venice than in Florence (Figure 10.1). It was true that the Venetian government’s attitude to the penitential movements of 1399 had actually been much more forthright than that of the Florentine communal councils, for the Venetians had first diverted the penitents and then suppressed them and exiled their leaders, while the Florentines had merely displayed an understandable
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suspicion of the approaching crowds. But Venice came to terms more readily than did Florence with its homegrown fraternities. In both cities, certainly, the authorities sensed that these organizations could easily harbor conspiracies or become instruments of faction. Hence the early statutes of the Scuole Grandi demand an express undertaking not to engage in plots against the state but to do only things that advanced the well-being of the doge and his subjects.37 In the 1370s Florentine flagellant companies, involved in peace demonstrations, were dissolved as tools of the Guelf party. In the 1450s at least one Florentine flagellant fraternity tried to extend charity into politics by offering to assist the weaker candidates, the “deboli alo squittino,� in the electoral districts or gonfaloni.38 Both the Venetian and the Florentine states showed anxiety to detach members of their ruling orders from the confraternities or at least to prevent a deep and timeconsuming involvement with their administration. Some Italian cities (Arezzo and Milan are examples) charged their patricians with the administration of confraternities and endowed charities 39 Florence and Venice followed another course, Venice reserving the administration of the Scuole Grandi for its lesser elite of non-noble merchants rather than for its nobility. In 1410 the Council of Ten confined office in the Scuole Grandi either to native citizens or to people who had obtained their citizenship by the issue of a special privilege but had already served at least twenty years in the scuola.40 And in 1462 they stipulated that notaries of the Ducal Chancery were not to be assigned any duties in the Scuole Grandi.43 Admittedly, the first decree was probably aimed at foreigners and newcomers as much as against patricians, and the avowed purpose of the second was to save civil servants from distraction by other commitments. There was no open suggestion that either nobles or notaries would make improper use of their positions in the scuole, and no proposal that noblemen be deprived of the spiritual benefits of membership, which they coveted to the extent of making belated attempts to enter them on the point of death. But the effect of these measures was to help consolidate the position of non-noble merchants and professional men within the social order, and at the same time to stabilize the confraternities by making their social utility clear. 736
One of their functions, henceforth, was to create a more clearly defined role within the state for the middle condition of men and to extend the range of attractive privileges at the disposal of state and society. In the 1440s the Florentine government passed what Richard Trexler has called a “fundamental law,” denying membership in confraternities to members of the city’s “political class” of veduti. They may not have enforced the law consistently, but this move was much tougher and displayed a much more uneasy attitude toward confraternities.42 Florentines, indeed, were warier than Venetians of confraternities at all social levels. They were more reluctant to permit the development of artisans’ brotherhoods, although such institutions became more common in the second half of the fifteenth century,43 and possibly even earlier. In Venice the scuola, or pious corporation, was closely bound to the arte, which consisted of all persons authorized to ply a particular trade. Despite being founded on different principles, the arte and the scuola normally coincided in membership, although a distinctive cultural or linguistic group within a trade might be allowed (as were the German journeymen bakers of Venice in 1422) to form a separate scuola of their own for religious and charitable purposes only. In effect, the overlapping arte and scuola formed the Venetian guild.44 Guilds in Venice, smaller and more numerous than the Florentine “conglomerates” and forming a cluster of arti mcdie rather than two tiers of greater and lesser guilds, had none of the political significance of their Florentine counterparts. They were not officered by patricians, and membership did not, as in Florence, bestow rights or permit entry to the ruling order.45 Venetian guilds were important chiefly as administrative links between the state and its subjects, and Venetians were not familiar with the Florentine concept of sottoposti, of workers who are subject to a guild but not part of it. Venetian patricians were alert to the ways in which most forms of brotherhood, especially those that dispensed charity, could (if properly controlled by state magistracies) be used in their turn to control ordinary people and remind them of their civic duties. It was not in their interests that artisans should remain outside the professional scuole; if they did, they would be less subject to authority rather than less capable of making trouble. 737
In dealing with confraternities, the Venetian patriciate tended to rely on constant surveillance, whereas the Florentines uttered at intervals the threat of dissolution and interfered more openly and bluntly. In 1419 their priors had “learned that as a result of the meeting of certain confraternities, the spirits of the citizenry have been perturbed, divisions have arisen, and many other inconveniences have occurred.” Hence the threatened dissolution of “every confraternity, whether penitential or dedicated to singing lauds . . . which is accustomed to assemble in the ecclesiastical foundations of the city of Florence.” 46 Though not as final or inflexible as they sounded, such measures could cause a hiatus in the activities of confraternities or change the nature of their membership even if they survived the crisis, as did the Compagnia de’ Magi after 1419 or the flagellant company of San Paolo after the later ban on confraternities in 1458-64.47 In Venice the Council of Ten had insisted in 1401 that all statutes be submitted for its approval.48 During the fifteenth century, it contented itself with regulating the social composition of officeholders, with curbing potentially disorderly activities (from processions to night meetings and public distributions of alms), with asserting proprietorially its own right to introduce into the rank and file of “our Scuole Grandi” persons willing to render service to the state, and with demanding of the scuole expanding contingents of bowmen and boatmen to fight in the republic’s wars.49 It would have been difficult, in either city, to dissolve brotherhoods that discharged important functions as public trustees. But sudden influxes of excessive wealth could be perilous and might expose a fraternity to very oppressive state interference. In Florence the fraternity of Orsanmichele suffered the imposition of obligations to lend to the commune and had to bear both with the commune’s insistence on appointing the fraternity’s financial officers and with insinuations that its captains were corrupt.50 In all probability, the older scuole in Venice advanced toward wealth in step with each other, none being sufficiently prominent to attract a landslide of gifts or legacies. Given the prestige enjoyed by another board of public trustees, the patrician Procuratori di San Marco, the Scuole Grandi could not claim exclusive control over institutional charity.51 They retained their separate identities and a certain sense of rivalry, and never submerged them in a unified organization. This 738
probably commended them to the state, for its rulers knew that control over charity is a source of power, and they were reluctant to see too great a concentration of such control; such considerations may explain the state’s failure to amalgamate its hospitals and its firm refusal to introduce a Monte di Pieta. True, Venice had at least one miracle-working image to match the famous portrait of the Madonna which showered riches on Orsanmichele. But the chief beneficiaries of the bounty that flowed toward the Madonna dei Miracoli, discovered in a narrow calle near the Ca’ Amai in 1480, were the nuns of Santa Chiara di Murano and not a lay brotherhood.52 Since the state was diverting religious institutions away from investment in house property in the middle and later fourteenth century, 53 and since it was recognized that repairs and maintenance often threatened to soak up income from real estate, there was probably a strong natural incentive to the scuole to turn toward the other readily available safe security appropriate to the sober portfolios of charities: government stock. This undoubtedly provided the foundation for the important dowry fund established by the Scuola di San Giovanni Evangelista in 1422.54 In Venice the state had less need to insist aggressively on its right to borrow. When bonds began to depreciate and the scuole swung back toward property, the state seemed confident of exacting services from them and thus ensuring that their wealth did not elude the public grasp.55 Since the Venetian state could five with and even harness its confraternities, they could the more readily express a form of “civic Catholicism.” As one of them proudly announced in 1476, “to the honor of our Lord God, the four Scuole dei Battuti are four pillars of this glorious city.” 56 But they did not stand for state worship or for a religion crudely and deliberately employed as an instrument of control and designed to procure submission and obedience to a ruling order. Renaissance states seldom saw themselves merely as manmade constructions designed to meet human needs and seldom found legitimation solely m their origins or descent from Trojans or Romans or other exemplars of human wisdom. Civic patriotism could well be expressed as belief in a people’s special religious mission, in the conviction that the Florentines had been chosen to bring about the rebirth of the Church from its deep corruption, the Venetians to defend 739
Christendom against the Turk, and that both must be pure enough to perform these tasks.” The Scuole Grandi set out to secure the intercession of the Virgin and saints on behalf of the city, to keep and show some of its relics, and to enhance the merit it would need in order to win the favor of God, on which depended so much of success in the world. The old statutes of Santa Maria della Misericordia would remind the brothers that the “congregation” was founded “ that the aforesaid Virgin Madonna Santa Maria di Valverde, our mother of mercy, may beg Our Lord Jesus Christ to keep our blessed city of Venice in good order and in peace and love, with all the lands of Christendom.” 58 To win divine favor, one must curb sin. As did most confraternities, the Scuole Grandi sought to compose quarrels and to define respectable behavior, by excluding certain kinds of undesirable people and by proscribing certain forms of reprehensible activity, including some that were furtive, hard to trace, and perhaps not actually illegal. In their statutes they observed the conventions widespread throughout Italy pretty closely, deeming it wise to condemn theft, though they did not expressly proscribe either usurious lending or (as in Florence) homosexual practices.59 “ Unnatural” vice perhaps seemed too obviously monstrous for inclusion here. It had always to be a matter for legal action, and not just for fraternal rebuke; a crime to be purged by the ax and the fire, applied by the Council of Ten through its Collegium Sodomitarum.60 Much of the displeasure of the scuole was directed against blasphemy, gambling, and taking pleasure in taverns — three closely related offenses acknowledged to be of a nature both spiritual and social, since they were said both to impoverish families and to wound Christ. Through their own regulations, with the sanction of fines and expulsion, the Scuole Grandi were imposing on their own members a discipline that was later to be thrust on the whole city by a new magistracy, the Esecutori contro la Bestemmia.61 There was nothing unusual in these censorious attitudes, but the Scuole may have contributed to Venice’s unusual success in attaching a social stigma to taverns—an achievement handsomely acknowledged even by Felix Faber, whose admiration for Venice was never unstinted.62 Relatively few Venetian patricians accepted the argument that the dropping of the wind behind the Venetian fleet at a crucial 740
point in a naval battle in 1499 could be traced to divine displeasure at Venice s lack of charity toward poor nobles.63 But most would have shared the diarist Friuli’s more commonplace reflection that we read in the Bible how often ancient peoples suffered punishment, mortification, ruin and exile on account of their sins and of their refusal to obey the commandments and precepts of God.” 64 In their efforts to correct sin, however, the Scuole Grandi did not go so far as to conduct didactic or evangelical campaigns; they had no particular concern with the moral improvement of youth, although they did offer marriage portions to young women of good reputation, and their objective, seemingly, was to prevent lapses on the part of fundamentally respectable people rather than to reclaim those for whom sinning was a way of life. Such missionary activities were certainly known in fifteenth-century Venice, but they were more appropriate to Brother John of Erfurt, who not only preached the Rosary but also effected the redemption of a number of harlots and the discomfiture of a number of pimps.65 Didactic campaigns were certainly more prominent in Florence. Richard Trexler has vividly depicted the fifteenth-century youth companies, which sought to control the leisure of adolescents in danger of sin, and he has described the Florentine belief in the redemptive power of innocence.66 Are there any Venetian parallels at all? It is certainly true that circa 1500 the Venetian Scuole Grandi liked to include children and young people in their tableaux and ceremonies. Usually they appeared in the guise of angels, as did those who scattered flowers over the doge and ambassadors at the Corpus Christi procession of 1494. Occasionally they took up other roles: a beautiful young woman played Venice itself in 1511, and a child was once assigned the task of “showing San Rocco the pestilence.” 67 But they were very much a part of the dramatic ensemble, integrated with other actors, and there is not much evidence that the Venetians were prepared to single them out, much less to abandon their traditional respect for age and experience and see the future of the city reposing in the young. Nothing seems yet to be known of pious youth clubs, as distinct from exclusive festive organizations such as the Compagnie delle Calze, in fifteenthcentury Venice. It should be said, however, that by the end of the century such clubs were being promoted by Franciscan preachers of the Observance in certain 741
subject cities on the mainland, and that youth organizations concentrating on imparting Christian knowledge rather than enforcing Christian morality would later appear in the Schools of Christian Doctrine in Venice itself.68 The Scuole Grandi represented a civic religion if by civic we mean “citywide.” In their search for members, they all attempted to embrace the whole city rather than to confine recruitment to particular parishes or quarters. They practiced a kind of ceremonial and administered a species of welfare organization which contributed to the unity of Venice. Some of this was epitomized in the duties of the so-called degani: the older scuole had two for each sestiere, that the whole city might be covered, and they performed the dual function of summoning brothers to processions and of reporting any cases of hardship they encountered among them.69 There are no systematic analyses of the residence patterns of the brothers of the Scuole Grandi, but from the painstaking researches of Richard Mackenney it is now clear that even minor brotherhoods in Renaissance Venice, though showing a natural bias toward the region in which they stood, could recruit some members from all the sestieri; the more socially exalted the scuola, the more even the distribution was likely to be.70 Edward Muir has written of the changes in the public ceremonial life of Venice and of the shift in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries towards rituals focusing on the central places of the city and exalting the city’s patron, St. Mark, above those of the parish churches. He has made much of the abolition of the Festival of the Twelve Marys, in which the parishes were strongly represented, in favor of a more decorous ceremony involving a solemn procession of the doge and stgnoria from San Marco to Santa Maria Formosa.71 There is not much detailed evidence to back his suggestion that control of poor relief was then passing from the parishes to the Scuole Grandi72 - we know too little of the parish accounts to say that with confidence. But it does seem likely that the “parochial age” of Venice lay in the sixteenth century rather than in the fifteenth. It was then that the senate entrusted numerous additional tasks, especially in poor relief and emergency policing, to the parishes and their deputies, and the Catholic church itself had a strong desire to remind the faithful of their duties as parishioners.73 One symptom of the process was the development, in Venice as elsewhere, of the 742
confraternities of the Blessed Sacrament, which were founded on the parishes and which helped both to enhance their meagre revenues and to decorate their churches.74 Florentine experience may well have been broadly similar, since some of the flagellant confraternities recruited from all or most parts of the city in the fifteenth century, and the parishes and the smaller subdivisions likewise came into their own during the sixteenth.75 It is worth remembering, though, that the development of the Scuole Grandi occurred in a city whose political system gave much less weight to the locality than did the Florentine, for there was no Venetian equivalent to the Florentine gonfaloni. Local prominence—the concentration of a family and its friends in a traditional bailiwick- provided no entrÊe to Venetian politics and office-holding as it did in Florence.76 The Scuole Grandi were not swimming against a strong tide, although they did perform an impressive role by drawing even humble people into a very broad network of relationships and obligations. Without doubt, involvement with the state meant the use of the scuole for warlike and diplomatic purposes, and it would be naïve to pretend that the sole purpose of the great brotherhoods was to win divine approval for a city and a people devoted to spiritual ends. Their part in recruitment for the armed forces has already been mentioned. Such responsibilities, which seem quite alien to the confraternities of Florence, were to become increasingly burdensome during the sixteenth century, when the enjoyment of much of their charity became conditional on readiness to serve in the galleys.77 During the wars that began in 1494, the Scuole Grandi moved between sacred celebrations, at which they presented biblical and religious tableaux, and other ceremonies marking the conclusion of new alliances. These were solemnly acted out in civic pageants that depicted Venice itself and the heads of state locked in the struggle for power in the peninsula and included allegorical figures such as Peace and Mercy. Even here, it was customary to proclaim the sacred character of Venice and its peculiar relationship with St. Mark and the Holy Spirit.78 Occasionally, however (the best example comes from 1526), the procession seemed designed to convey not the piety but the wealth of the city, since its magnificent displays of silver vessels and reliquaries were offered in homage to the power of money to finance war. San Giovanni Evangelista bore the 743
slogans Venetia plena divitiis (“ Venice filled with riches”) and Hie Venetiis aurum et argentum (“Here is the gold and silver of the Venetians”) (Figure 10.2).79 In the past, at least one festival had been performed for similar purposes in Florence, as was the Festival of the Magi in a moment of grave domestic crisis during the 1460s.80 In Venice the intended audience was probably not the Venetian people but rather foreign diplomats, agents, and spies, including those of hostile powers. Ambassadors of friendly states might join the pageant; others watched it. Commynes was invited to witness the processions celebrating the Holy League of 1495, which was directed partly against the too-rapid successes of the king of France; so was the Turkish envoy, “ hidden at a window; he had been dismissed, but they wanted him to see this festival.” 81 For many Venetians, no doubt, the point was not to watch but to take part and so to feel some identity with the city and its friends abroad. Such talk of a civic religion inevitably conjures up those ominous terms secularization and laicization. They imply different things. Secularization suggests a move toward worldly concerns: perhaps toward a pompous and materialistic piety, perhaps toward activities whose avowed purpose was to benefit society rather than the soul. Laicization may well refer to something almost opposite, that is, to a fuller participation of the laity in religious life, and the breaking down of barriers between the world and those who are out of it. One may well suspect that by the late fifteenth century the brotherhoods had come to represent a formalistic, mechanical version of religious experience, unduly concerned with outward things, and badly in need of the reinvigorating hands of the devotion of the Rosary and of the Companies or Oratories of Divine Love. Italian brotherhoods in general had long promoted the role of the laity in the ceremonies of the Church, through processions and the singing of lauds, and had encouraged their better understanding, by means of specially provided sermons. 82 They had laid heavy stress on those things that laypeople could and did do without the intervention of a priest, such as the recitation of prayers, the distribution of charity, and the acting of sacred characters in pageants or mystery plays.83 Possibly the companies did worse than that. Gilles-Gerard Meersseman, the historian of Dominican brotherhoods, noted with regret a number of (to him) 744
ominous secularizing developments that occurred within the fifteenth century: emancipation from the influence of spiritual directors, nepotism in the form of bequests made conditional on the admission of relatives to the brotherhood, roistering on the feast days of patron saints, and above all a tendency on the part of brotherhoods devoted to works of mercy (as at Arezzo and Imola) to abandon liturgical duties in favor of social administration.84 Judiciously, however, he cheered himself with other, more hopeful, signs, of a readiness to look beyond the formal and external. An extensive commentary on the statutes of a flagellant company in Bologna, written in 1443, seemed clearly intended to explain the spiritual meaning of ritual, to diminish the value of physical acts, such as extravagant gesture in prayer, and to represent prayer itself as an act of the mind. 85 Venetian evidence suggests that the Scuole Grandi had long been unlikely to submit in any formal or official manner to the direction of clerics. There seems to be no obvious trace of their having chosen, or asked a local convent to choose for them, a preeminent spiritual director, as did the disciplinati of Siena and Prato in the fourteenth century.86 They were, however, eager to foster good relations and pool good works with Venetian clergy and nuns, and they undoubtedly walked with them (or rather, before them) in the great public processions. At the close of the fifteenth century, the Scuola di San Rocco could refer without hesitation to its priestly and clerical brothers.87 Once, in 1345, another scuola had doubted the propriety of giving them any such name, since laymen could not compel clerics to observe a rule, and therefore the officers would not have full power to command them.88 No such scruples appeared to trouble the devotees of San Rocco. The scuole were not content with chapels in mendicant churches or with meetingplaces in their convents: they wanted premises of their own, and the Scuola di San Rocco aspired from the beginning to have a church for itself. But the Franciscan Conventuals of the great church of the Frari became its landlords, and it built nearby. For half a century, from 1489 to 1540, their relations were governed by an unduly complicated agreement, which not merely entailed the payment of rents and dues to the friars but also imposed on both parties an obligation to attend each other’s festivals and funerals. The friars could certainly have exerted great 745
influence on the brothers through the pulpit, since the contract bound the scuola to invite the Franciscans to preach at all the monthly assemblies.89 But it would no doubt have been unwise, and unacceptable to the Council of Ten, to offer any of them a position that could imply that the scuole were clerically dominated and therefore entitled to claim fiscal or other privileges as ecclesiastical institutions. Their entitlement to receive and administer extensive properties depended in part upon their recognition as lay organizations. In Florence, formal clerical control is easier to detect. The statutes of confraternities seem to have been willingly submitted to the energetic archbishop Antonino Pierozzi, and he was not the first to receive them. Friars were included among the captains of at least one brotherhood and probably more.90 It is true that in Venice the patriarch had to be consulted where a scuola wished to build a church or to remove it from one site to another, that he might be called upon to authenticate relics, and that he could add to the indulgences available to members of a confraternity.91 But the approval of statutes fell to the Council of Ten, and subjection to the state was far more in evidence than was any formal deference to the judgment of the Church. The Venetian scuole were remarkable not only for their freedom from formal clerical control (they may have received clerical advice more often than they admitted) but also for their conservatism in devotion. To judge by statutes alone, in the absence of information about actual practices, the Scuole Grandi of the late fifteenth century adopted a traditional attitude toward the sacraments and were not inclined to insist on the value of frequent communion and confession. “It is customary for men of the world to shave their beards and wash their shirts at least once a month,� declared the mentor of the disciplinati of Bologna, exhorting his readers to a spiritual cleansing in the form of confessions made at similar intervals. 92 But the Scuola di San Rocco seemed unwilling to urge its brothers beyond the legal minimum of annual communion, with some encouragement to confession, and it reserved much of its rhetorical power for extolling daily attendance at the Mass, as the re-enactment of the Passion of Christ.93 Without doubt, to take up another of Meersseman’s points, officers of the Scuole Grandi did involve themselves in charitable activities which, being elaborate and systematic, threatened to divert time rom devotional to administrative pursuits. 746
Conservative in their devotional regime they were quite enterprising in the practice of mercy and charity. Like the Buonommi di San Martino in Florence, they dealt with the problems of those loosely called poveri vergognosi, who had to be sought out and assisted m their own homes. Venice had no confraternity solely and expressly devoted to these people until the 1530s, when acknowledging their debt to Florence-they established the fraternity of Sant’Antonino. In effect, however, the Scuole Grandi were dealing with vergognosi long before that time and using the word in their records. The term could be used with a strict meaning to refer to persons who had fallen from good fortune and could no longer maintain their noble or civil condition: some were merely in reduced circumstances, others actually in a state of destitution. But the words could be stretched to denote almost any kind of respectable house poor, as distinct from street beggars or persons shamelessly pursuing charity: the poveri vergognosi were the “shamefaced poor,” who would struggle to conceal rather than advertise their distress.94 The Scuole Grandi were aware of both kinds of poor, and when they wrote of the decayed gentlefolk and atoms they sometimes used the participle mensuegnudi. In 1506 the Scuola della Carita announced that it was “at present heavily burdened and weighted with poor persons, and especially with our own good citizens who on account of their own ill fortune and for no other reasons have been brought low and have descended into the greatest poverty and wretchedness, so that they not only lack the means to maintain their lives and those of their families, but even require assistance in order to cover their bodies and conceal some part of their need.”95 The scuole resembled the Buonomini di San Martino of Florence m that they concentrated chiefly on the problems of poor families rather than on those of solitary individuals. But they differed from the Buonomini in concerning themselves principally with their own membership, with persons who had contributed to the common pool of merit. And the Scuole Grandi were far more than almsgiving societies. Their resources came to include both extensive dowry funds and a number of almshouses, as well as some tiny hospitals similar in dimensions to the many small private foundations distributed throughout the city. 96 747
Administering charities certainly implied much concern with the practical and the material, both on the part of the officers and on that of potential beneficiaries. Some of the entrants were driven by questionable motives, and seemed eager only to scheme for and bargain with the benefits the scuole offered.97 But the wording of their records does not suggest any glaring contradiction or unresolved tension between charity performed as a spiritual action and charity addressed to practical and worldly concerns. Resolving to build a new block of almshouses in 1511, for the benefit of poor brothers with numerous children and indebted for rent, the officials of San Rocco reminded themselves that “works of charity lie chiefly in assisting the poor and needy, and since our blessed confraternity was founded in the love of God we must with all diligence assist our poor brothers, of whom we must have care no less than of ourselves, according to the divine precept, which says, Love your neighbor as yourself.” ’98 In the late fifteenth century, friars of the Dominican Observance, visiting the city, believed in detaching the worldly from the sacred and in divorcing pagan from Christian culture. They were sometimes unfavorably impressed by the Venetian tendency to confuse the two. John of Erfurt self-consciously resisted the temptation to base his sermons on Cicero or Virgil or “the fantastic dogma of the philosophers and the pretty fictions of the poets.” 99 Felix Faber, censorious of the Dominicans of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, referred with distaste to the presence of pagan images in their great church, including the figures of naked gladiators and boys embellishing the doges’ tombs. But he noted that the Venetian people took them for saints or biblical figures, supposing that Hercules must be Sampson and Venus the Magdalen.100 Perhaps it was true of the Scuole Grandi that they, too, were capable of absorbing worldly paraphernalia, material resources, and even a smattering of classical culture into a conservative Christian devotional regime. In the 1460s, the Scuola della Carita enjoyed quoting Seneca and citing Cicero and other ancient authors in evidence of the need to be grateful to benefactors;101 this was an agreeable literary flourish imparting elegance to normally austere registers, and was hardly a surrender to the values of the ancient world. In general, the Scuole Grandi were expressions of a form of civic Catholicism, and they could become so in Venice because of the state’s capacity for coming to 748
terms with them, and for harnessing fraternities more effectively than did the rulers of the Florentine commune. Though not militantly anticlerical, they stood for a species of religious organization that had developed, through the Council of Ten, far stronger links with the state than with the parish, the diocese, or the pope. They promoted the cohesion of Venetian society by stressing the mutual obligations of rich and poor, by defining the limits of respectability, by proscribing antisocial behavior, and by enticing their members away from essentially local concerns. Yet the state they served was a sacred corpus, and one of their purposes was to add to its virtue, to beg for it the intercession of the saints, and to make it worthier of the favor of God. In the next century, their importance would scarcely be challenged. True, they would be increasingly affected by the state’s obsessive concern to raise oarsmen for its reserve fleet; they would face stronger rivalry from the parishes; and new kinds of charity, redemptive as well as supportive, would arise to deal with the obtrusive problem of the unrespectable poor. But on dramatic occasions, especially during Paul V’s Interdict, they and the Conventual Friars would still stand publicly for an old Catholicism that had forged strong links with the state, against a new Catholicism linked through the newer religious orders to the pope in Rome.102 During the Counter-Reformation, the tension between the Venetian state and the Society of Jesus, between the Catholicism of St. Mark and that of St. Peter, had become much more formidable than the mild but unmistakable contrast between the civic and the universal brotherhoods of the late fifteenth century— between the Scuole Grandi of Venice and the Confraternity of the Rosary in the convent of Dominican friars.
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Notes The following abbreviations are used in citing archival material: ASV Archivio di Stato, Venice IRSG Inquisitori et Revisori sopra le Scuole Grandi SDRM Sala Diplomatica Regina Margherita SG Scuole Grandi SR Archivio della Scuola Grande di S. Rocco, Venice 1. I was especially excited by Wilbur Jordan’s first volume, Philanthropy in England, 1480-1660 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1959). 2. SR, Mariegola, fols. nr-i6r. See also W. B. Wurthmann, “ The Scuole Grandi and Venetian Art, 1260-c. 1500” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1975), 118-25. 3. The Memoirs of Philippe de Commynes, ed. S. Kinser, trans. I. Cazeaux, 2 vols. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1969), 2:493. 4. L. Sbriziolo, “ Iter la storia delle confratemite veneziane: Dalle dehberazioni miste (1310—1476) del Consiglio dei Dieci. Le scuole dei battuti,” in Miscellanea Gilles Gerard Meersseman, 2 vols. Italia Sacra: Studi e documenti de storia ecclesiastica, 16 (Padua: Antenore, I970), 2:737. 5. Cf. SR, Mariegola, fols. 8v-9r. 6. Ibid., fol. 14, 16 May 1487. 7. Sbriziolo, “ Per la storia,” 761-62. 8. R Faber, Emgatorium in Terrae Sanctae, Ambiae et Egypti peregrinationem, ed. C. D. Hassler, 3 vols. (Stuttgart, 1843-49), 3:428-29. 9. Quoted in A. Niero, “ Pieta uffidale e pieta popolare in tempo di peste,” in Venezia e la peste, 1348-1797 (Venice: Marsilio, 1979), 287. 10. See esp. R . J. Palmer, “The Control of Plague in Venice and Northern Italy, 1348-1600” (Ph.D. diss., University of Kent, 1978), 57 ff., particularly his excellent chapter, “ Religion and the Plague,” 280-314; see also E. Rodenwaldt, Pest in Venedig 1575- 77. Ein Beeitrag zur Frage der Infektkette hei den Pestepidetnien West-Europas (Heidelberg: Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Math.-naturw. Klasse, 1953), 66 n. 1. 11. G. G. Meersseman, “ Le origini della Confratemita del Rosario e della sua iconografia in Italia,” in his Ordo fratemitatis: Confratemite e pieta dei laici del Medtoevo, 3 vols., Italia sacra, 24-26 (Rome: Herder, 1977), 3:1170-1232; for the statutes, see 1215-18. 12. Cf. J. C. Schmitt, “Apostolat mendiant et societe: Une confrerie dominicaine a la veille de la reforme,” Annales: Economies, societes, civilisations 26 (1971): 103-4, and idem, “La Confrerie du Rosaire de Colmar (1485): Textes de fondation, ‘Exempla en allemand d Alain de la Roche, listes des precheurs et des soeurs dominicaines,” Archivum Fratrum Predicatorum 40 (1970): 97-124. 13. Sbriziolo, “ Per la storia,” 7-8; B. Pullan, Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice: The Social Institutions o f a Catholic State to 1620 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1971), 86-87. 14. Note the statute of Sta. Maria della Carita (probably of the second half of the thirteenth century): “ Item volumus et ordinamus quod non liceat aliquibus nostris officialibus huius fratemitatis recipere aliquam mulierem in fraternitate ista, nisi esset conventus integer monacharum” (SG, Sta. Maria della Carita, 233); see also that of S. Giovanni Evangelista in March 1327: “ fuit ordinatum et placuit omnibus quod aliqua domina mundana deinceps non possit nec debeat recipi in istis nostris scolis ullo modo seu ingenio” (SG, S. Giovanni Evangelista, 7: fol. I7r-v). On the ascetic practices of the nuns of Corpus Christi, see L. Sbriziolo, Note su Giovanni Dominici,” Rivista di storia della Chiesa in Italia 24 (1970): 26-27. 15. Schmitt, “Apostolat mendiant,” 100. 16. See W. A. Christian, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981). 17. For several examples, see Meersseman, Ordo fratemitatis, vol. 2. 18. A. Niero, “ La mariegola della piu antica Scuola del Rosario di Venezia,” Rivista di storia della Chiesa in Italia 15 (1961): 324-36; idem, “Ancora sail’ origine del Rosario a Venezia e sulla sua iconografia,” Rivista di storia della Chiesa in Italia 28 (1974): 465-78; Meersseman, “Le origini,” 1199-1201, 1206-14. 19. Faber, Evagatorium, 1:106. 20. SG, SR/2, 7, 12 October 1484; SR, Mariegola, fol. 13. 752
21. See V. Meneghin, “ Due compagnie sul modello di quelle del ‘Divino Amore’ fondate da Francescani a Feltre e a Verona (1499, 1503),” Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 62 (1969): 549-22. SG, SR/2, fol. 6, 18 May 1516; Pullan, Rich and Poor, 157-58. 23. SDRM, 76:11. 24. The words are taken from an important piece of propaganda, bunched by enthusiasts for the cult of the Marian Psalter, summarizing the sermons which its proponent, the Breton Alain de b Roche, delivered at Douai in 1475. Very likely, this would be used by John of Erfurt. See G. G. Meersseman, “Alano della Rupe e le origini delb Confratemita del Rosario,” in Ordo fratemitatis, 3:1158-59, 1164-65, 1167. 25. Faber, Evagatorium, 1:101. On the cult of S. Rocco and its iconography in Venice, see S. Mason Rinaldi, “ La peste e le sue immagini nelb cultura figurativa veneziana,” in Venezia e la peste, 209-24. 26. See E. Debruelle, “ Les grandes processions de penitents de 1349 et 1399,” in II Movimento dei Disciplinati nel vii centenario del suo inizio (Perugia-1260), Appendix 9 to Bollettino della Deputazione di storia patria per IVmhria (Spoleto, 1962), 109-45; G. P. Tognetti, “ Sul moto dei Bianchi nel 1399,” Bullettino dell’ Istituto storico italiano per il medioevo e archivio muratoriano 78 (1967): 205-343; Sbriziolo, “ Note,” 9-19. 27. On the development of trusts in Venice and their range of investments, see R . C. Mueller, The Procuratori di San Marco and the Venetian Credit Market A Study of the Development of Credit and Banking in the Trecento (New York: Amo Press, 1977), 47-48, 58-60, 6 5-7 1,114-19 . 28. Pullan, Rich and Poor, 63-83. 29. See J. S. Henderson, “ Piety and Charity in Late Medieval Florence: Religious Confraternities from the Middle of the Thirteenth to the Late Fifteenth Century” (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1983), 28, 31-32, 77-88. See also G. G. Meersseman, “I Disciplinati di S. Domenico a Firenze,” in Ordo fratemitatis, vol. 2, esp. 733 —39. 30. R . Hatfield, “ The Compagnia de’ Magi, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 32 (1970): 107-61. 31. R. F. E. Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence (New York: Academic Press, 1982), 52-53, 91-104. 32. IRSG, 1: fols. 2v~3r, 6 March 1409. 33. Pullan, Rich and Poor, 72; G. Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 141. 34. Canon Pietro Casola’s Pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the Year 1494, ed. M. M. Newett (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1907), 148-52. 35. Henderson, “ Piety and Charity,” 118,137, 315-17; Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood, 130-3136. R . R . Harding, “The Mobilization of Confraternities against the Reformation in France,” Sixteenth-Century Journal II (1980): 92-98. 37. For example, SDRM, 76:11; SG, S. Giovanni Evangelista, 3, foi. 13v and 7, fols. Iiv-I2r. For Florence, Venice, and the Bianchi, see esp. Tognetti, “ Sul moto,” 256-57, 313-23. 38. See G. A. Brucker, Florentine Politics and Society, 1343-78 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1962), 320-21; N. Rodolico, I Ciompi: Una pagina della storia del proletariat operaio (Florence: Sansoni, 1945), 54—55; Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood, 164-68; J. S. Henderson, “ Le confraternite religiose nella Firenze del tardo medioevo: Patroni spirituali e anche politici?, Ricerche storiche 15 (1985): 77-94. 39. G. G. Meersseman, “ Le Congregazioni della Vergine,” in Ordo fratemitatis, 2:998; A. Noto, Gli amid dei poveri di Milano, 1305-1964 (Milan: Giuffre, 1966), 24-25. 40. IRSG, fol. 3r-v, 12 February 1409 (Venetian style). 41. Ibid., fol. 12, 31 March 1462. On the notaries of the chancery, see M. Neff, “A Citizen in the Service of the Patrician State: the Career of Zaccaria de’ Freschi,” Studi veneziani,n.s. 5 (1981): 33-61. 42. R . C. Trader, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (London: Academic Press, 1980), 408; Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood, 164-72. 43. Trader, Public Life, 404, 411-12, 414; Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood, 64-65. 44. On Venetian guilds, see R . S. Mackenney, “Trade Guilds and Devotional Confraternities in the State and Society of Venice to 1620” (Ph.D. diss., University of Cambridge, 1982), and idem, “Arti e stato a Venezia tra tardo medioevo e ’6oo,” Studi veneziani, n.s. 5 (1981): 127-43. See also B. Pullan, “ Natura e carattere delle scuole,” in Le scuole di Venezia, ed. T. Pignatti (Milan: Electa, 1981), 9-26. 45. Cf. R . A. Goldthwaite, The Building o f Renaissance Florence: An Economic and Social History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 242 ff.
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46. Text in G. Brucker, ed., The Society of Renaissance Florence: A Documentary Study (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 83-84; see also idem, Renaissance Florence (New York: Wiley, 1969), 208. 47. Hatfield, “ Compagnia,” Iio -n ; Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood, 117-18, 173- 74- See Henderson, “Le confraternite,” 86, for examples of the different effects on various confraternities of the law of 1458. 48. IRSG, fol. 2r-v; Sbriziolo, “ Per la storia,” 724. 49. Sbriziolo, “ Per la storia,” 724, passim; IRSG, fols. 2r-20v; Wurthmann, “ Scuole Grandi,” 104-11. 50. See R . C. Trexler, “ Florence, by the Grace of the Lord Pope . . . ,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 9 (1972): 164-69; and, for an extensive and detailed discussion of the fortunes of Orsanmichele, see Henderson, “ Piety and Charity,” 146 ff. 51. See Mueller, Procuratori, passim. 52. D. Malipiero, Annali veneti dalV anno 1457 al 1500, ed. A. Sagredo, in Archivio Storico Italiano 7 (1843-44): 672. 53. Mueller, Procuratori, 125 ff. 54- SG, S. Giovanni Evangelista, 2: fols. 38r-39r. 55- Mueller, Procuratori, 140-41; Wurthmann, “ Scuole Grandi,” 68-69, 84-87. 56. SG, Sta. Maria della Carita, 236; fol. iov, 1 December 1476. 57- Cf. D. Weinstein, “The Myth of Florence,” in Florentine Studies: Politics and Society in Renaissance Florence, ed. N. Rubinstein (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), 15-44, and idem, Savonarola and Florence: Prophecy and Patriotism in the Renaissance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970). 58. SDRM, 76:11. 59- See Trexler, Public Life, 379-82; Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood, 88. 60. See E. Pavan, “ Police des moeurs, societe et politique a Venise a la fin du Moyen Age,” Revue historique 264 (1980): 276ff.; P. H. Labalme, “ Sodomy and Venetian Justice in the Renaissance,” Legal History Review 52 (1984): 217-54; Ruggiero, Boundaries of Eros, 109-45. 61. See R . Derosas, “Moralita e giustizia a Venezia nel ’500-’6oo: gli Esecutori contro la Bestemmia, in Stato, societa e giustizia nella repubblica veneta (sec. 15-18 ), ed. G. Cozzi (Rome: Jouvence, 1980), 431-528. 62. Faber, Evagatorium, 3:407-8. 63. R . Finlay, Politics in Renaissance Venice (London: Ernest Benn, 1980), 77-78. 64. G. Priuli, I diarii, 4, ed. R. Cessi (Bologna: Nicola Zanichelli, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, vol. 24, pt. 3, 1938), 29-30. 65. From the Historia mirabilis concerning John of Erfurt, printed in Meersseman, Ordo fratemitatis, 3:1227. 66. R. C. Trexler, “ Ritual in Florence: Adolescence and Salvation in the Renaissance, in The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion, ed. C. Trinkaus, with H. A. Oberman (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974), 200-64, and Trexler, Public Life, 367 ff., 473 ff. 67. Canon Pietro Casola’s Pilgrimage, 149; M. Sanuto, I diarii, ed. R . Fulin et al., 58 vols. (Venice, 1879-1903), 13: cols. i32 f f , 20: cols. 274-75, 21: cols. 46-7, 42: col. 65. 68. See Meneghin, “ Due compagnie,” on the foundations inspired by Fra Timoteo da Lucca; see also Pullan, Rich and Poor, 401-4. 69. For example, SG, S. Giovanni Evangelista, 2: fols. 4V, 46V-47V. 70. Mackenney, “ Trade Guilds,” 107-24. 71. E. Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), 135-56, 299-300. 72. Ibid., 153. 73. See Pullan, Rich and Poor, 253-54, 297-301; J. Bossy, “The Counter Reformation and the People of Catholic Europe,” Past and Present 47 (May 1970): 51-70. 74. Pullan, “ Natura,” 12-13; see now P. Hills, “ Piety and Patronage in Cinquecento Venice: Tintoretto and the Scuole del Sacramento,” Art History 6 (1983): 30-43; and N. S. Davidson, “The Clergy of Venice in the Sixteenth Century,” Bulletin of the Society for Renaissance Studies 2 (1984): 19-31. 75. Weissman, Ritml Brotherhood, 66-74; 206 ff. 76. Cf. F. W. Kent, Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence: The Family Life of the Capponi, Qinori, and Rucellai (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977), 171-73. 179-80, 186-88, 195-96; D. V. Kent and F. W. Kent, Neighbours and Neighbourhood in Renaissance Florence: The District of the Red Lion in the Fifteenth Century (Locust Valley, N.Y.: J. J. Augustin, for Villa I Tatti, 1982), 17-19. 77. Pullan, Rich and Poor, 143-56. 78. Sanuto, I diarii, 13: cols. 132-41, 20 October 1511. 79. Ibid., 42: cols. 62-78, 8 July 1526. 754
80. Hatfield, “ Compagnia,” 114-18. 81. Commynes, Memoirs, 2:500-501. 82. Meersseman, “ Le Congregazioni della Vergine,” Odo fratemitatis, 2:949 ff. 83. Cf. Hatfield, “ Compagnia,” 124-25; M. B. Becker, “Aspects of Lay Piety in Renaissance Florence,” in Trinkaus and Oberman, Pursuit of Holiness, 177-99. 84. Meersseman, Ordo fratemitatis, 2:618-21, 743~45, 997~98, 1001-3. 85- Ibid., 612-27, 669-89, 692-97. 86. Ibid., 599, 635-36, 650. 87. SR , Mariegola, fol. 9v. 88. SG, S. Giovanni Evangelista, 3: fols. 20v-2iv. 89. SR, Mariegola, fols. 37r~39r, 46V-48V. 90. Henderson, “ Piety and Charity,” 35-36, 333, 342-43. 91. SR, Mariegola, fol. 13; Meersseman, Ordo fratemitatis, 3:1217. 92. Meersseman, Ordo fratemitatis, 2:673. 93. SR, Mariegola, fol. 7v. 94. Cf. Pullan, Rich and Poor, 267-68; R . C. Trexler, “ Charity and the Defense of Urban Elites in the Italian Communes,” in The Rich, the Well Bom, and the Powerful Elites and Upper Classes in History, ed. F. C. Jaher (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), 64-109; A. Spicciani, “ The ‘Poveri Vergognosi’ in Fifteenth-Century Florence,” in Aspects of Poverty in Early Modem Europe, ed. T. Riis, Publications of the European University Institute 10 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981), 119-82. 95. SG, Sta. Maria della Carita, 236: fol. 30V, 28 August 1506: “questa nostra benedeta scuola se atrova al presente esser molto carga et agravada de poveri et maxime de nostri boni citadini, i quali per la loro mala fortuna e non per altra causa sono mensuegnudi e venuti in grandissima calamita e miseria, ita che i non hanno solamente bisogno de substentar la loro vita et de quelli de caxa sua, ma etiam hanno bisogno de qualche sufftagio de coprir le came sue et nasconder qualche parte della sua inopia.” 96. On these, see F. Semi, G li “ospizi” di Venezia (Venice: Helvetia, 1983). 97. SG, Sta. Maria della Carita, 236: fol. 24r-v, 8 July 1492. 98. SG, SR/2, 44: fol. 78, 6 January 1511 (Venetian style): “ le opere della charita consistono prezipuamente in subvegmr li poveri bixognosi et essendo questa benedetta confratteraita fondata in charita del signor dio dovemo eziam chon ogm studio e diligenzia atender a la subvenzion delli nostri poveri fradelli, de li qual dovemo aver chura non mancho che de nui medeximi sechondo il prezetto divino che dize ‘dilige prossimum sichut te ipsum. 99. Meersseman, Ordo fratemitatis, 3:1227-28. 100. Faber, Evagatorium, 3:425. 101. SG, Sta. Maria della Carita, 236: fols. iv, 5, 8 February 1460 (Venetian style), 18 March 1466. 102. Pullan, Rich and Poor, 58-61.
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Ronald F. E. Weissman Cults and Contexts: In Search of the Renaissance Confraternity From the History of Spirituality to the History of Sociability. The image that comes to mind most vividly of the Renaissance confraternity is of course, that of a group of penitents lamenting their sins, garbed in humbling and hooded sackcloth, faces covered and egos masked, anonymous to the world. In the absence of materials more informative than statute books, we often tend to view the confraternal experience as timeless, characterized by a dour sameness of devotional form and religious belief. And we often limit our study of confraternities to the study of devotional forms and their roots in forms of spirituality. The historiography of confraternities has changed dramatically during the past two decades. Particularly with respect to Italy and France, during the nineteenth century confraternities were part of a romantic historiography seen as an element of Europe’s vanished corporate and intimate culture1 or as a defining feature of the vanished era of Christian Europe, a time of devout lay piety. The history of Renaissance confraternities is still commonly seen as part of the history of spirituality, narrowly defined as devotional history or as ecclesiastical institutional history. Studies typically emphasize the devotional practice of one or another confraternal movement such as the Flagellants or Rosarians. To the extent that confraternities have been studied with respect to their contexts, such contexts tended to be reduced to the moment of their foundation by an individual monastic or mendicant order. Beyond traditional devotional history, studies have frequently focused on the history of a particular confraternity in a particular place to serve often the antiquarian ends of local history. Even now, comparative studies 756
of the confraternal movement are quite rare. The very a-historicity and contextlessness of much of the traditional work on the subject have prevented the asking of comparative questions. For some, particularity historians of spirituality, this lack of broader context is not a problem; indeed, still current among some is the view that confraternities need little explanatory context beyond an understanding that these pious associations embodied the religious aspirations of late medieval Christians. These historians see little need to ask questions of context, for to ask such questions is to miss what is most important and obvious: Christians formed confraternities to practice piety. To understand the theology, underlying confraternal devotion is to understand, even to explain confraternities. 2 While I would not deny the importance of a solid understanding of theology for the interpretation of devotional practice, I would at the same time remind those who reduce confraternities to doctrine that the late medieval world offered the Christian many forms of spiritual, ritual, and pious practice. For the sociocultural history of religion, the question is not only “what doctrines underlay devotional practice, but also “how and why did Christians favor certain practices over others, and what meanings did laymen attribute to these practices?” “Why do some devotions fall from popular favor?” And, ultimately, “how and why do organized groups such as confraternities make the collective choices to favor one or another pious practice?” Viewing the history of piety as the history of choices made from among a wide range of doctrines and practices requires one to look at, among other things, the composition of the groups making such choices and their culture. Doctrine and traditional spirituality do most certainly provide a context for the study of confraternities. Indeed, broad thematic movements in spirituality, devotion, and theology such as the imitatio Christi, the singing of lauds, flagellation, and the cult of saints should be viewed as global to European Christendom, providing a range of pious choices for devout laymen. But what I would also emphasize is that the how and the why of choice-making is often based on the meaningfulness of rites and devotions for those who practiced them. We should not accept as an a priori fact the notion that confraternities are what the clergy has said they were supposed to have been.3 757
During the past two decades, some historians of piety have broadened significantly the contextual analysis of Renaissance and baroque confraternities and related movements of lay religion. Through the work of such scholars as Grendi,4 Agulhon,5 Pullan,6 de la Ronciere,7 Davis,8 Galpem,9 Bercé,10 Gutton,11 Henderson,1’2 Chiffoleau,13 Paglia,14 Zardin,15 Trexler,16 Weissman,17 Hoffman,18 Rusconi, Vincent,20 Banker,21 and Black22 confraternities have been examined within the contexts of community, sociability, and the social and moral order in late medieval society. During the past decade, a flood of research has elevated the study of confraternities from the periphery to a central place in the history of lay piety and sociability. Through the work of recent historians, confraternities have begun to be placed in a world broader than theology and simple devotional history.” The contexts of community, sociability, and lay culture are now seen as fundamental to understanding the associational and spiritual life of Mediterranean townsmen. Key to the modem interpretation of confraternities has been the understanding of the confraternity’s place in the parish, town, and region; its relation to the clergy and to secular authority; its membership and recruitment; and its mechanisms of promoting internal solidarity and integration within the broader community. Indeed, the best of these studies have often been exemplars of local history, integrating the evolution of confraternal organization and practice into a broader history of relations among groups and among elite and popular ideologies and identities more broadly understood. Given the wealth of recent studies, we can begin to ask comparative questions and form generalizations about European or at feast Mediterranean confraternities. What, then, were the distinctive characteristics of the Renaissance confraternity? Types of Piety. For the period under discussion, Renaissance confraternities offered a range of devotional behaviors and roles: the penitent, the supplicating client, the militant, the patron, the merciful minister of justice, the civic-minded citizen, and the dutiful member of a lineage. Most familiar is the activity of the penitent found in flagellant and penitential companies. The penitent, taking on the guise and garb of the anonymous pilgrim, 758
sought to expiate personal and social sin by acts of mortification, debasement, and humiliation, understood as the imitation of Christ. Through mendicant-like acts of self-abasement, including flagellation, the penitential confraternity members experienced an extreme dissociation from the world and, once purified, a communal celebration of fellowship stripped of pomp, status, and rank. An intense preoccupation with interior religious experience and prayer characterized the devotional practices of these confraternities, thus creating for some laymen the role of contemplative or mystic. Also familiar is die worshipful client, maintaining the altars of local churches, marching in procession and displaying the valued relics of the community, maintaining thereby the proper supplicant to patron relationship between the local community and the celestial court of paradise.23 In a manner analogous to clients propitiating earthly patrons, confraternal clientela sought to gain the favor of patron saints by offering public praise, laude, and through feasts and other occasions commemorating the power and virtues of saintly patrons. And often associated with confraternal clientage was a celebratory piety associated with festive rites and rituals. Beyond the best known flagellant, laudesi, mystic, and celebratory forms of fraternal piety were other important pious roles. Some confraternities allowed members to play the role of generous, charitable patron dispensing alms to the poor. In communities such as Florence and Venice and throughout Provence, certain confraternities behaved as quasi-public entities, distributing the official charity of the commune or government. In a world in which clear lines did not always separate the sacred from the civic, such confraternities offered the layman a chance not only to play the patron but also to exercise the sacred duties of stewardship of the community. Other confraternal forms of piety straddling the ambiguous boundaries between the sacred and secular and the public and private included that piety associated with rites of justice and mercy—that is the comforting of those in prison or those awaiting execution.24 Opposing heresy in the thirteenth century and fighting Protestantism in the sixteenth offered laymen the role of Christian knight whose piety involved the militant display of orthodoxy, whether in support of the Inquisition or to display 759
the Sacrament in taunting opposition to Protestant belief and practice.25 Finally, through memorial Masses confraternity members practiced a commemorative familial piety centered around the cult of ancestors and the affirmation of bonds between the living and the dead.26 Several pious roles, including penitent, client, celebrant, Christian militant, minister of justice and mercy, mystic, patron, and obedient member of a real or Active family, often appeared within the same confraternity. Each of these pious roles had its own degree of attraction for the very different organizations that we associate with the term ‘confraternity’ from the late Middle Ages through the Early Modem period. The confraternal movement of the late medieval and Early Modem period was quite varied. Confraternities can be categorized by formal devotional practices, including Marian Penitential, Rosarian, Sacramental, and Oratorian; or by their organizing principles: parish, rural or urban community, guild or profession, geography of residence (parish or quarter), religious status (priests or laymen), class, nationality (especially for foreigners residing abroad), sex and marital status, including abandoned wives widows and ex-prostitutes, or by age. Confraternities can be distinguished by their religious activities: maintaining the altars at a local church, sponsoring a devotion or a cult, supporting the devotional activities of a parish, fostering association and social insurance among members of a craft, burying the dead administering charity or the seven works of mercy throughout the community, providing mutual assistance to members, supporting an active ministry and the enforcement of orthodoxy, providing a community of prayer and assistance for urban clergymen, teaching Christian doctrine to laymen and their children, or organizing festive behavior on holy days. Beginning of an Interpretation. In examining this variety of devotional and institutional forms, I would like to call attention to six characteristics which distinguish the Renaissance confraternity from those that came before and after. By Renaissance confraternity I mean those associations which populated the Mediterranean world during the great flowering of confraternal devotion from the mid-fourteenth through the early sixteenth centuries. The essential characteristics of Renaissance confraternities were:
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their status as autonomous lay institutions; their corporate character and links to the community; their social heterogeneity; their synthesis of interior spirituality and collective action; their festive character; and their cultural fluidity. Lay Religion and Lay Institution. The first characteristic common to Renaissance confraternities of virtually every type and region is their fundamental character as autonomous lay institutions. It is true though perhaps over emphasized that many Renaissance confraternities and movements of devotion owed their existence to the mendicant orders. But one must separate origins from the ongoing life of these institutions. As André Vauchez reminds us, confraternities exemplify a kind of Brownian motion, constantly undergoing birth, death, refoundation, and reform. 27 However originally founded, the Renaissance confraternity, particularly when contrasted with forms of association in baroque Europe, was dominated by laymen. They were only loosely supervised by bishops, who, incidentally, acted more frequently to protect confraternal privileges from secular authorities than to impose order on confraternities. And, until the sixteenth century, they were generally free from the control of the parish clergy. Confraternities elected their own chaplains, frequently shared public confession of sin among their members, and imposed their own discipline on their brothers, a discipline supervised by the company’s officers rather than by its hired priests. Some confraternities went so far as to bar priests not serving as chaplain from membership.28 While it is certainly true that members of the clergy played critical roles in the foundation of some confraternities—and here San Bernardino of Siena preaching in Tuscany or Manfredi da Vercelli preaching in Bologna come to mind—clerical sponsorship or direction of Renaissance confraternities was a transient thing, rarely lasting very long after an organization’s foundation. Particularly when contrasted with the contraternal organization of the European baroque, it is important to remember that the typical Renaissance confraternities were lay organizations—dominated, championed, and defined over the long term by their lay members. Laymen were proud and confident about their ability to 761
foster as laymen the right practice of religion. As John Henderson has pointed out, the lay confraternity was popular in part because of its reliance upon a vernacular liturgy.29 Confraternity, Corporation, and Community. The Renaissance confraternity developed in an environment in which corporate groups flourished. Guilds, artisan associations, parish opere, kin- based alliances, political leagues, and societies of many kinds provided much of the organic structure of medieval and Renaissance society.30 Urban governments—communes—were themselves often coalitions of just such corporate groups. In the historiography of European confraternities, much has been made of mendicant and monastic models of piety and association. The similarity of the confraternity’s lay governor to a monastery s abbot is a familiar topos in the literature of confraternities. Less has been made of the confraternity’s relationship to medieval and Renaissance corporate culture more broadly. Certainly, several confraternity offices such as the governor, the master of novices, and those responsible for the maintenance of the confraternity’s cult were modeled on monastic orders. Nevertheless, confraternities, particularly in Italy, often took on an organizational form similar to other corporate organizations modeled on the civic commune. Among the similarities to the commune were the practices of rapid rotation of offices, their electoral methods, and their offices and officeholding structure. Florence offers an extreme, case, of this phenomenon. The electoral practices of confraternities were so closely modeled on Florentine civic practice that the election bags of some confraternities were even emblazoned with the arms of the Florentine Republic.31 Beyond institutional form and similarity to communes, I stress the corporate character of Renaissance confraternities for several reasons. First, late medieval and Renaissance piety had a strongly collective dimension. Penance and redemption, in part, were viewed as collective processes, depending on the collective action of the group a sacred community.32 Second, as corporate oiganizations in a corporate society, confraternities occupied an ambiguous place between our conceptions of public and private. As private voluntary associations, they were also called upon to perform public, quasi-municipal duties including 762
pacification of quarrels and the distribution of alms in time of public crisis.. In urban communities, certain confraternities such as the Scuole Grandi of Venice had official civic responsibilities, and contraternal officers were considered in part members of the civic administration.33 In rural Europe, the relation between confraternity and community was even closer. Throughout much of Mediterranean France confraternities of the Holy Spirit served both as the primary focus of lay piety and as the primary form of village solidarity and municipal administration arbitrating disputes, serving as a council of elders, even on occasion managing emergency farm supplies and organizing hunting parties for lost cattle. The distinction between religious confraternity and craft fraternity was also often hard to discern. The personal basis of recruitment and sponsorship in many confraternities could transform socially heterogeneous devotional groups into craft societies. And craft associations, like devotional societies, used the language and symbols of religious association to express their bonds of solidarity. Both groups buried and commemorated their dead, provided mutual assistance to members, and gathered under the protection of a patron saint. As corporations embodying the corporate ideals of -the community, Renaissance confraternities fostered a sense of collective obligation and an activist this-worldly piety, rooted in collective action. Finally, as corporations, the value of confraternal action did not depend as much on the individual actions of each member as on the action of the confraternity as a corporate body. Valid confraternity acts depended on the typically small number of members who attended any particular meeting.36 The officers and members in attendance, the corpo di compagnia or body of the confraternity, was legally constituted to perform works accruing to the benefit of all members, including the living and the dead. Here again the confraternity differed from one of its later baroque forms, the congregation, which was simply an aggregation of-individuals praying under the same roof. Social Heterogeneity. Apart from craft fraternities, typical Renaissance confraternities were socially heterogeneous and included members of the local patriciate, the middle classes, and wide representation of urban artisans. Indeed, many organizations constituted a broad sampling of the respectable social order, 763
including all but the most miserable of the urban poor.37 In some organizations, women enjoyed auxiliary or full-fledged memberships.38 Such heterogeneity was not incidental. Rather, it was an essential element of Renaissance lay piety. The social diversity of the typical Renaissance confraternity provided a theater for Renaissance ritual: rites of humiliation and inversion, and a practical forum for ritual exchange. .It was here that the Renaissance economy of salvation took its fullest form in the exchange between the rich who provided alms and the poor who offered their prayers for the salvation of the rich. Believing in the collective remediation of sin and the utility of religion to safeguard the community, the social diversity of the Renaissance confraternity offered a mirror of the social order, a microcosm of the town in its search for saintly protection and intercession and collective salvation. The culture of the Renaissance confraternity does not divide neatly into “high” and “low,” “popular” and “learned.” Its devotional forms and themes—clientage and patronage and the penitential imitatio Christi—were valued by noble and commoner alike. In that most cultivated of cities, Florence, even late fifteenthcentury Neoplatonist intellectuals shared common assumptions about lay devotion and pious practice with more humble members of fraternal societies. Interior Devotion and Collective Action. Throughout this essay, I have stressed the corporate and collective nature of Renaissance confraternities. What is striking about Renaissance piety is its balance between collective, external formal action and inner contemplation, between ritual and the interior life. Flagellation and other penitential rituals such as rites of inversion and humiliation practiced on Holy Thursday did not stand in opposition to a deep interior piety of introspection, lamentation, and tears. For the Renaissance townsman, such rituals provided the purgative and cathartic experience required to reinforce a deep examination of the soul. The imitation of Christ was understood both as a mental attitude, a willingness to contemplate suffering, and as a real willingness to experience a brief moment of actual bodily suffering. Ritual suffering and humiliation led to deep introspection; ritual introspection, in tum, led to renewed fervor for holy action in the world, for peacemaking, reconciliation, and charity. In examining the Renaissance confraternity, we should not adopt a naively 764
contemptuous Erasmian or Protestant-influenced hostility toward ritual as empty or as opposed to or inferior to the interior life of the soul. The religion of the Renaissance confraternity member assumed a reciprocity, a symbiosis between inner and outer, action and contemplation, private remorse and public reconciliation. Individualism and corporate collective action were complementary facets of the Renaissance religious experience.40 The Festive Character of Confraternities. One of the most important elements of confraternal life that has been ignored or treated scornfully by traditional historians of piety is the festive character of communities and their confraternities. The rehabilitation of festive life is perhaps one of the most striking contributions of contemporary Early Modem European social history. The Mediterranean town, large or small, is now understood to be an intimate, face-to-face community characterized by strong interpersonal bonds as well as pervasive jealousy, tension, status conflict, and ego competition similar to the interdependent individualism so often noted in peasant communities, medieval and modem alike. In such communities, suspicion and generosity, anger and charity coexist readily and easily. Festive life, like ritual, often emphasized reconciliation and the recovery of social harmony after periods of intense conflict through cathartic experience or the restoration of right order through the ritual enforcement of a community’s moral code. Confraternal banquets and other festive behavior accompanying the celebration of a holy day served such ends: the channeling of repressed violence and anger into such relatively harmless activities as carnivalesque revelry, tournaments, races, and animal combats, ritual inversion of social hierarchy and the restoration of right order through festive mockery, charivaris, abbeys of misrule, Italian potenze and compagnie di piaceri, the latter often so much a part of the life of “regular” confraternities. One should not differentiate too strongly the “festive” from the “pious.” Many Renaissance companies were to a greater or lesser degree festive societies, run as traditional devotional confraternities most of the year, as was Sarda Maria della Neve in Florence, one of the city’s premier festive societies.41 How should we interpret a confraternity’s annual feast? A commemoration of the Last Supper? An occasion for cathartic revelry? A rite of 765
integration and affirmation of corporate identity? It was, of course, all of these things, a mixture of carnival and communion, of the sacred and the profane. But what is essential to our understanding of the variety and importance of confraternal festive life in the European town is our understanding that such festivity was part catharsis, part fellowship, part affirmation of corporate identity, part interior penance, and part visible combat between the sacred and the profane. The Fluidity of Cultural Boundaries. One of the traditional functions of religion is to establish social categories and cultural boundaries and thus to provide a cosmological justification for the social order and its categories, its ways of knowing, classifying, and describing things. Hierarchical societies are especially fond of boundary-making. The Renaissance confraternity distinguished itself by its acceptance of ambiguity and its lack of firm cultural or social boundaries. In contrast to movements of baroque piety, the Renaissance confraternity did not draw sharp boundaries between sacred and secular, sacred and profane, public and private, social classes or groups, the interior life and external ritual, or between fraternal craft associations and devotional societies. What does stand out are boundaries between the sexes and between age groups—not surprising for organizations capable of generating strong male bonds and whose members varied their own participation across the life-cycle. Laudesi companies tended to be more attractive to older married couples—again, not surprisingly in companies which sponsored the cult of familial piety and patronal worship through the burial of the dead and the commemoration of ancestors. Flagellant groups, practicing a cathartic flagellation ritual, on the other hand, attracted unmarried males from their late adolescence through their early thirties.43 From the Renaissance to the Baroque. To place the aforementioned characteristics of Renaissance confraternities in broader relief, it is necessary to contrast the Renaissance confraternity with what succeeded it, the baroque confraternity born out of the social and religious ferment associated with movements of religious reform in the sixteenth century. And here, the story of the transformation from Renaissance to baroque spirituality is constant across Mediterranean France, from Florence to Rouen, from Lombardy to Lyon. 766
In contrast to the relatively autonomous lay organizations of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, confraternities from the mid-sixteenth century onward carpe under increasing clerical control. Between the 1530’s and 1604 essentially all the mechanisms were developed that reformers such as Borromeo and Vincent de Paul would find so useful in reforming lay spirituality: the parish confraternity molded after Rome’s company of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, which received official sanction in 1539, the catechetical Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, also parish-based, and the Papal Bull Quaequinque of 1604, which established the absolute authority of the Church over all confraternities. Increasingly, confraternities lost their autonomy, merged with or were succeeded by parishbased organizations ran by the parish itself. By the end of Borromeo’s episcopate in Milan, for example, 556 out of 772 parishes had founded a parish confraternity of the Holy Sacrament.44 A handful of parish confraternities had existed in Florence before the sixteenth century; by the end of the sixteenth century, nearly half of Florentine parishes had founded confraternities.45 In medieval and Renaissance Europe, clerical involvement in confraternities was an often brief moment at the company’s foundation. The baroque confraternity, in contrast, was tied over the long term to that most stable of ecclesiastical institutions, the parish church. The clergy, armed with papal bulls, indulgences from Roman archconfraternities, and a renewed sense of administrative competence and authority marked by better record-keeping and by a regular parish visitation process, was able to exercise permanent and systematic, not fleeting control over lay religion.47 Absorbed into the parish and becoming narrowly devotional in character, baroque confraternities lost much of their corporate and their festive character. And these confraternities also lost much of their municipal roles as supplement to town governments. Resurgent town or regional governments or the Church itself absorbed duties heretofore performed by confraternities. Those collective manifestations of communal association and identity, the confraternities of the Holy Spirit, for example, were suppressed throughout such dioceses as Lyon during the seventeenth century.48
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In place of social heterogeneity, confraternities now exemplified social hierarchy. Socially mixed confraternities such as the old penitential companies adopted new membership rules to restrict entry of members to local elites. New confraternities were founded having mi exclusively elite character. Among the most famous of elite societies were the White Penitents of the Gonfalon, the Black Penitents of the Crucifix, the Penitents of Mercy, and the Congregation of Messieurs in Lyon, and the Florentine Company of the Blood. The baroque gentlemen’s academy, too, had its origins in the growing cultural differentiation between learned and popular classes. Indeed, some academies developed directly out of the con- fraternal movement as an older confraternity became transformed not simply into a pious society for the elite but into an actual gentlemen’s club. In many sixteenth-century confraternities having Renaissance or late medieval origins, two classes of members emerged: those, who paid and those who prayed. Elites could receive benefits of membership for a fee without performing most other confraternity obligations, particularly those now-distasteful rituals of humiliation and inversion. Parish companies of the Holy Sacrament and craftbased artisan confraternities on the one hand, and restrictive elite confraternities for gentlemen, on the other, exemplified strong class divisions between patrician and commoner and increased the social and cultural distance between them.50 Throughout Mediterranean Europe one finds a widening gulf between the pious practices of urban elites and the rest of die population. Committed to aristocratic and courtly ideals of hierarchy, honor, and purity, elites, shunning older forms of confraternal piety, viewed feasts, festivals, and rites of catharsis and inversion as too much a mingling of sacred and profane, honorable and base. Such rites threatened too much social pollution. Elite identity, bound up with aristocratic, exclusivist, courtly virtues and strict adherence to the new codes of etiquette, stressed a learned, stylized, interior, and private piety.51 Often involved in the control of parish sacramental confraternities, elites nevertheless generally eschewed participation in actual parish rites and feasts 52 In town after town, one finds elite devots, encouraged by the reformed clergy, rejecting the actual practice of flagellation and refusing to participate in local processions.53
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Reforming elites converted rituals of inversion and catharsis into little more than moments of intense contemplation, stressing, for example, the private adoration of the Sacrament or the meditative recital of the Rosary.54 One historian summarized eloquently the sixteenth century’s desire “to shift the emphasis in sacramental penance from satisfaction following penance to interior discipline preceding it.”55 In such a transformation, even the term ‘discipline,’ which had heretofore signified penitential flagellation, took on a new meaning, the systematic examination of conscience.56 Those theaters of Renaissance ritual, sacred social exchange, collective action, and festivity, fifteenth-century penitential confraternities, were by the early seventeenth century being transformed into more passive congregations. These congregations were places where groups came together to pray and contemplate separately as individuals. In contrast to the social and cultural fluidity of the Renaissance confraternity, the baroque confraternity drew boundaries of all sorts: between social classes, between the sacred and the profane, public and private, mind and body. Narrowly specialized confraternities of many kinds emerged, each with its own charity to patronize or its own interior devotion to sponsor. But lacking rituals of solidarity, these having been suppressed by the reformed clergy and being stripped of festive life, baroque associations, even parish confraternities, at best attracted modest levels of enthusiasm. Indeed, among the most common elements of baroque religion was what Peter Burke referred to as the battle between the spirits of Carnival and Lent57 The reformed clergy and courtly elites sought to suppress the dangerous, ambiguous festive and cathartic ritual behaviors that gave the Renaissance confraternity its character and sought as well to break the link between now-favored interior piety and scorned ritual action and festivity. The weak sociability of parochial sacramental confraternities is one sign of the resistance among urban artisans and the rural peoples of the Mediterranean to the Catholic Reformation ethos. A resurgent anticlericalism, particularly in villages and rural communities, is another sign of such resistance and a desire of many to maintain those traditional ritual and festive practices in which they had played a major role in shaping and which in turn had played a major role in 769
defining their own communities 58 As the members of one Iberian community explained when describing why they had killed their urbane, educated, reformminded, festival-suppressing priest: “He’s not a real priest. If he were, he wouldn’t be trying to take our religion away from us.”59 What, then, are the contexts for understanding the Renaissance confraternity? First, the similarity of Renaissance confraternities and the similar fortunes that befell these organizations during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries should warn us against too much emphasis on purely local circumstances or situations. I do not mean that confraternities were not firmly embedded in the social order of their local communities—far from it. What I would suggest is that the ways in which such embedding took place were fundamentally similar across communities and that the intimate, face-to-face nature of sociability and clientelist systems of symbolic reference were in fact similar across the Mediterranean. Too many of us, myself included, have tended to explain confraternities in terms of local contexts when in fact such contexts were common to the region. I would certainly include the theology underlying ritual and devotion among the important objects of study worthy of our attention, but not as an explanatory factor as much as a thing in need of explanation. That Europeans viewed the process of catharsis, festivity, and inversion as fundamental components of religious experience explains why certain confraternal practices were popular. The theology of such practices illuminates the terms through which contemporaries legitimated and described their rituals, but it does not explain their popularity. In the study of European confraternities, I would give as much weight to sociability as traditional historians have given to theology since it is after all from sociability and human experience that devotions come to have meaning for the people who created and chose to practice them—or, indeed, to reform, redefine, or ignore them.
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Notes 1. André Vauchez, “Les confréries au Moyen Age: esquisse dun bilan historiographi- que,” Revue historique, 275 (1986), 467-77. 2. Most notable among such interpretations is the magisterial woric of Gilles Gerard Meersseman, Ordo Fraternitatis: confraternite e pietà dei laici nel medioevo (Rome: Herder 1977), 3 vols. 3. See, for example, how the townsmen of San Sepolcro grappled with their own conceptions of purgatory and the afterlife, despite official Church teaching (James Banker Death in the Community: Memorializations and Confraternities in an Italian Commune in the Late Middle Ages [Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1988], pp. 176-77). In Banker's analysis. Church doctrine and practice followed from, rather than determined lay behavior and belief. 4. Eduardo Grondi, “Morfologia e dinamica della vita associativa urbana: Le confraternite a Genova fra i secoli XVT e XVm,” Atti della Società Ligure di Storia Patria 79 (1965).239-311. 5. Maurice Agulhon, Penitents et francs-magons dans t'ancienne Provence (Paris- Fayard, 1968). 6. Brian Pullan, Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice: The Social Institutions of a Catholic State (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971). 7. Charles de la Roncière, “La place des confréries dans l’encadrement religieux du contado Rorentin au XIV* siècle: L'example de la Val d'Elsa," Mélanges de l'Ecole frangaise de Rome: Moyen Age-Temps Modernes, 85 (1973), 31-77, 633-71. 8. Natalie Zemon Davis, “Some Tasks and Themes in the Study of Popular Religion,” m r^ 3 6 * W7 °f Holiness, ed. Chaiies Trinkaus and Heiko A. Oberman (Leiden: Brill, 1974), 9. A. N. Galpem, Religions of the People in Sixteenth-Century Champagne (Cambridge* Harvard Univ. Press, 1976). 10. Yves-Mane Bercé, Féte et rivoli: Des menlalités populates du XVI* au XVIII* siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1976). 11. Jean-Pierre Gutton, “Reinages, abbayes de jeunesse et confréries dans les villages de l'anctenne Fiance,” Cahiers dHistoire. 4 (1975), 443-53; La Sociabilità villageoise dans l'ancienne France: Solidarités et voisinages du XV/"* au XVIII™ sièctes (Paris: Hachette, 1979X “Confraternities. Cures and Communities in rural areas of the dioceses of Lyons under the Andai Regime,” in Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800, ed. Raspar von Greyerz (London: German Historical Institute, 1984), pp. 202-21. 12. John Henderson, “Confraternities and the Church in Late Medieval Florence” in Voluntary Religion, ed. W. J. Shells and D. Woods. Studies in Church H,story, 23 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 69-83; “Ure Flagellant Movement and Ragellant Confraternities in Central Italy, 1260-1400,” in Religious Motivation, ed. D. Baker, Studies in Church History 15 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978). pp. 147^0; “Society and Religion in Renaissance’ Florence,” Historical Journal, 29 (1986), 213-25. 13. J. Otiffdeau, La complabilité de fau-delà: les hommes, la mort el la religion dans la region d Avignon à ia fin du Moyen Age (Rome: Ecole frantfaise de Rome. 1980). 14. Vincenzo Paglia, 'La Pietà dei Carcerati': Confraternita e Società dei Carcerati a Roma nei secoli XVtXVIf (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1980). 15. Danilo Zardin, Confraternite e vita di pietà nelle campagne lombarde tra '500 e '600: La pieve di Parabiago-Legnano (Milan, 1981). 16. Richard C. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (New York: Academic Press. 1980); “Charity and the Defense of Urban Elites in the Italian Communes” in The Rich, the Well Born and the Powerful: Elites and Upper Classes in History, ed. F. C. Jaher (Urbana: Umv. of Illinois Press, 1973), pp. 64-109; “Ritual in Florence: Adolescence and Salvation in the Renaissance.” in The Pursuit of Holiness, ed. Trinkaus and Obetman, pp. 200-64. 17. Ronald F. E. Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence (New York: Academic Press, 1982). 18. Philip T. Hoffman, Church and Community in the Diocese of Lyon, 1500-1789 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1984). 19. Roberto Rusconi, “Confraternite, compagnie e divozioni,” in Storia d' Italia, Annali, 9 (1986), 469-506. 20. Catherine Vincent, Des charités bien ordonnés: les confréries normandes de la fin du XII f stècle au début du XVf siede (Paris: Ecole normale supérieurc, 1988). 21. Banker, Death in the Community, passim. 22. Christopher F. Black, Italian Confraternities in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989). 772
23. Vincent, pp. 117-42. 24. Paglia, passim; Samuel Y. Edgeiton, Jr., Pictures and Punishment: Art and Criminal Prosecution during the Florentine Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985); Black, pp. 217-23; see also the paper by Kathleen Falvey in the present book. 25. Philip Benedict, “The Catholic Response to Protestantism: Church Activity and Popular Piety in Rouen, 1560-1600,” in The Religion and the People, 800-1700, ed. James Obelkevich (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1979), pp. 168-90. 26. On confraternities and the cult of the dead, see Galpem, passim; Banker, passim. 27. Vauchez, “Les confréries au Moyen Age,” p. 472. 28. Some confraternities, such as Florence’s Company of San Paolo, went so far as to bar all members of the clergy, except the company’s elected chaplain, from membership; see Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Compagnie Religiose Soppresse, Capitoli, XXVII, fol. 26v (1472). 29. On the lay domination and weak role of the dergy in pre-Tridentine confraternities, see Hoffman, p. 26; and Banker, pp. 177-79. 30. Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900-1300 (Oxford, 1984), pp. 67-78, 167-83. 31. Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood, p. 63, 32. Banker, pp. 162-63. 33. Pull an, passim. 34. Gutton, pp. 202-03; Hoffman, p. 59. 35. On the blurred distinction between craft and religious confraternities, see Robert A. Schneider, Public Life in Toulouse, 1463-1789: From Municipal Republic to Cosmopolitan City (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1989); Anthony Black, Guilds and Civ'd Society in European Political Thought From the Twelfth Century to the Present (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press 1984), pp. 1-11. 36. Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood, pp. 130ff. 37. Black, pp. 38-43; Vincent, pp. 213-17; Banker, pp. 163-73; Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood, pp. 67-77. PreTridentine membership lists of confraternities in Toulouse indicate a similar mix of occupations and status groups (Schneider, p. 111). 38. Black, pp. 34-38; Vincent, pp. 204ff. See also Sherrill Cohen, “The Convertite and the Malmaritate: Women s Institutions, Prostitution, and the Family in Counter-Reformation Floreira/’ Ph.D. diss (Princeton Univ., 1985). 39. Weissman, “Sacred Eloquence: Humanist Preaching and Lay Piety in Renaissance Florence,” in Christianity and the Renaissance, ed. Timothy Verdon and John Henderson (Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 250-71. 40. On the penitential rites of Renaissance confraternities, see Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood, pp. 90-105. 41. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, p. 400. 42. See Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Reasons of Misrule: Youth Groups and Charivaris in Sixteenth-Century France,” Past and Present, 50 (1971), 41-75; Trexler, “Ritual in Florence. Adolescence and Salvation in the Renaissance,” passim, on age gradations in confraternities. 43. Chi confraternity membership and the lifecycle, see Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood, chap. 3, for laudasi and disciplinati membership patterns in Florence, and Vincent, pp. 204£f, for membership in confraternities stressing familial piety and the cult of the dead in Normandy. 44. Zardin, pp. 20, 28, 69-73. 45. Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood, p. 206. 46. The parochialization of sixteenth-century confraternities has been documented by Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood, pp. 206-11; Black, pp. 75-76; Vincent, pp. 281ff; Hoffman, pp. 103-11. On the role of parish confraternities and Confraternities of Christian Doctrine, see Giancarlo Angelozzi, Le confraternite laicali: un'esperienza cristiana tra medioevo e età moderna (Brescia: Queriniana, 1978), pp. 43-44. On the latter, see Paul Grendler, “The Schools of Christian Doctrine in Sixteenth-Century Italy,” Church History, 53 (1984), 319-31; Black, pp. 223-28. 47. On the growing ecclesiastical control of confraternities during the course of the Catholic Reformation, see Black, pp. 62-65. On the new piety of the Catholic Reformation, see also Maureen Flynn, Sacred Charity: Confraternities and Social Welfare in Spain, 1400-1700 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 115-45. 48. Hoffman, pp. 105-07. 773
49. Hoffman, pp. 38-39, 73; Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood, p. 198. 50. On the relationship between post-Tridentine confraternities and the growing cultural distance between social classes, see Robert Muchembled, Popular Culture and Elite Culture in France, 1400-1750, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1985), passim. 51. On the Jesuit-inspired elite devotions of the Catholic Reformation and elite fear of pollution, see Louis Chatellier, The Europe of the Devout: The Catholic Reformation and the Formation of a New Society, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989). 52. By 1609, for example, one Florentine parish recorded that none of its elite residents (cittadini) was willing to participate in parish sacramental processions (Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood, p. 218n). 53. Black, pp. 100-01; Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood, pp. 206-07, 220-34. By the early sixteenth century, one of the most elite and distinguished Venetian Scuole Grandi had forbidden its regular members to undertake the flagellation ritual and had hired flagellants for its Holy Thursday rite (Pullan, pp. 51-52). 54. For the suppression of popular festivity by the reformed post-Tridentine Church, see Gutton, pp. 204ff; Hoffman, pp. 90ff. 55. John Bossy, Christianity in the West. 1400-1700 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), p. 127. 56. Bossy, p. 57. 57. Peter Buike, Popular Culture in Early Modem Europe (New York: T. Smith 1978), chap. 8. ’ 58. Hoffman, pp. 111-14, provides rich evidence for the hostility felt by townsmen at the attempted suppression of festive culture by the agents of reform. 59. Unpublished work of Joyce Riegelhaupt on Portuguese anticlericalism in the seven- teenth century.
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