Table of Contents

List of contributors; Acknowledgements; Introduction: the politics of ritual kinship Nicholas Terpstra; 1. The development of confraternity studies over the past thirty years Christopher F. Black; 2. Homosociality and civic (dis)order in late medieval Italian confraternities Jennifer Fisk Rondeau; 3. Confraternities and lay female religiosity in late medieval and Reniassance Umbria Giovanna Casagrande; 4. The bounds of community: commune, parish, confraternity and charity at the dawn of a new era in Cortona Daniel Bornstein; 5. Men and women in Roman confraternities in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: roles, functions, expectations Anna Esposito; 6. The Medici and the youth Confraternity of the Purification of the Virgin, 1434–1506 Lorenzo Polizzotto; 7. In loco parentis: confraternities and abandoned children in Florence and Bologna Nicholas Terpstra; 8. The first Jesuit confraternities and marginalised groups in sixteenth-century Rome Lance Lazar; 9. Jewish confraternal piety in sixteenth-century Ferrara: continuity and change Elliott Horowitz; 10. The scuole piccole of Venice: formations and transformations Richard S. Mackenney; 11. Relaunching confraternities in the Tridentine era: shaping conscience and Christianising society in Milan and Lombardy Danilo Zardin; 12. The development of Jesuit confraternity activity in the Kingdom of Naples in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Mark A. Lewis; 13. Corpus Domini: ritual metamorphoses and social changes in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Genoa Claudio Bernardi; 14. Faith's boundaries: ritual and territory in rural Piedmont in the early modern period Angelo Torre; 15. The suppression of confraternities in Enlightenment Florence Konrad Eisenbichler; Bibliography; Index.