| Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion in Renaissance Bologna Contributor(s): Terpstra, Nicholas (Author) |
|
 |
ISBN: 0521480922 ISBN-13: 9780521480925 Publisher: Cambridge University Press OUR PRICE: $132.05 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: January 1996 Annotation: This book analyzes the social, political, and religious roles of confraternities - the lay groups through which the Italians of the Renaissance expressed their individual and collective religious beliefs - in Bologna in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Confraternities shaped the civic religious cult through charitable activities, public shrines, and processions. This civic religious role expanded as they became politicized: patricians used the confraternities increasingly in order to control the civic religious cult, civic charity, and the city itself. The book examines in detail how confraternities initially provided laypeople of the artisanal and merchant classes with a means of expressing a religious life separate from, but not in opposition to, the local parish or mendicant house. By the mid-sixteenth century, patricians dominated the traditional lay confraternities while artisans and merchants had few options beyond parochial confraternities which were controlled by parish priests. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Religion | Institutions & Organizations - Philosophy | History & Surveys - Renaissance - History | Europe - General |
| Dewey: 267.182 |
| LCCN: 94037936 |
| Series: Cambridge Studies in Italian History & Culture |
| Physical Information: 0.81" H x 6.25" W x 9.3" (1.15 lbs) 272 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: The Renaissance is still often wrongly characterized as a period of religious indifference. Contradicting that viewpoint, this book examines confraternities: lay groups through which Italians of the Renaissance expressed their individual and collective religious beliefs. Intensely local and dominated by artisans and craftsmen, the confraternities shaped the civic religious cult through various activities such as charitable work, public shrines, and processions. This book puts these religious activities into the turbulent social and political context of Renaissance Bologna. |