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This chapter discusses the origins of the six great Venetian lay confraternities (San Giovanni Evangelista, San Marco, Santa Maria della Carità, Santa Maria della Misericordia, San Rocco, and San Teodoro), known as scuole grandi, following the disciplinati movement of 1260. It treats the statutes of the scuole, called mariegole, and the founding principles of devotion, charity, patriotism, and honor. The membership of the scuole, representing all classes of Venetian society, and the organization of the confraternities, with officers elected from members of the citizen class, are also considered. Other topics include the finances of the scuole, their rules and regulations, and government supervision of their activities by such bodies as the Council of Ten. Finally, the chapter discusses the archives of the scuole, preserved today primarily in the Archivio di Stato of Venice.

This chapter presents institutional histories of ecclesiastical music in Manila. It traces the development of vocal and instrumental music in the cathedral, and examines the foundation of the Colegio de Niños Tiples in the mid‐eighteenth century. As Manila Cathedral was frequently under repair or reconstruction due to damage by earthquakes and fires, other religious institutions assumed importance as centers of musical practice, including convents and colleges of the Augustinians, Franciscans, Jesuits, Dominicans, Recollects, and the Hospitaller Order of Saint John of God (San Juan de Dios). The chapter discusses biographies of individual musicians and considers the roles of Filipino musicians. Musical practices of institutions for women and girls, including the Monasterio de Santa Clara and numerous beaterios, are also examined. Finally, the chapter explores the music of Manila's parish churches and confraternities, and the legislation for the appointment of indigenous musicians in parishes and missions throughout the Philippines.

In 1998 the local devotees of the Cristo Aparecido held their Franciscan priests hostage over a dispute about the Cristo. Seeking to modernize local Roman Catholic faith, these parish priests criticized devotion to the Cristo and withheld their support from ritual celebrations of the image. The Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, the national government body empowered to protect the art historical legacy of the nation, intervened on behalf of local devotees and lay leaders to defend traditional celebration of the image. For local believers, the Cristo symbolizes their collective identity and the vulnerability of their own, embattled faith.

This chapter looks at the geographical distribution of the order's houses, the incorporation of many of them into the prioral estate as preceptories, camerae or membra, and the amalgamation of others. It discusses the practice by which most estates were let out on long lease, and the responsibilities of farmers examined, together with disputes between them and the order. The order's income from land, spiritualities, and confraternity payments is examined in the context of the overall economy. The order's conventual common treasury in Rhodes or Malta levied taxes known as responsions on its priories and preceptories. The methods by which these were assessed and collected by the receiver and scribe of the common treasury are discussed, and figures provided for the sums due and dispatched. Particular mention is made of the dispatch of responsions to the Mediterranean either in the form of goods such as cloth and tin or by means of letters of exchange.

This chapter discusses the significance of crusading in later medieval and 16th century English and Welsh society, concluding that there was still enthusiasm for holy war, but little opportunity to pursue it. The Hospital provided an outlet for such enthusiasm through its confraternity, which was proclaimed with reference to the defence of the faith, but it is not clear from the sources that all commentators identified the order with crusading. The order's further significance as a provider of the sacraments outside the parish network, its consequent disputes with the secular clergy, and the particular features of its liturgical and devotional practises are also examined. The order's social position as a landowner and employer is explored, with particular reference to its reliance on the relatives of brethren, members of the gentry, and a small body of expert servants to run its estates, so that its members became somewhat divorced from direct contact with society at large.

Radical brotherhoods have been particularly subversive of patriarchal authority because they remain more open than the church or the state to a wide range of possibilities contained in both the past and the future. Radical brotherhoods were not completely successful in their attempts to replace the charismatic and traditional authority of abbots, noble families, and patricians. However, they did institute a commonwealth of time that undermined precedents and claims to priority and made the present open to the past and the future. In complex modern societies, patriarchal authority is diffused through law and administration, and it is far more difficult to identify the sources of repression and the causes of unnecessary suffering. Further steps toward secularization will depend in part on the ability of radical confraternities to break the ties of diffuse obligation that bind the individual to the larger society.

Academic debates about sin and confession in the parish have begun to investigate the anchorite's role. Chapter 7, building on the argument that the anchorite's vocation was concerned with eradicating sin, reveals how anchorites helped their clients and confraternity members to tackle the problem of sin in their own lives. The first step, usually, was to inspire repentance in the sinner or extract some sort of confession by a process of informal negotiation, whereby penitent supplicants hoped for intercession in return. Contrite clients were rewarded with the anchorite's services as an intermediary between God and humanity, but not everyone was lucky enough or worthy to enjoy this special privilege. Anchorites would not do all the work; sinners were expected to undertake penance, but the parish anchorite, who communicated with the heavens through visions, may well have offered a certain spiritual expertise that was lacking in the parish priest.

This chapter looks at relations with the church, exploring themes of eternal security, earthly status and the material provision of shelter for meetings, before and after the Reformation. In 1475 the Incorporation received not only their seal of cause, granting them trade-regulatory privileges, but also a separate grant of an altar to Sts John the Baptist and Evangelist. This distinction between craft guild and confraternity is crucial to our understanding of the House. The Incorporation made important contributions to public worship, though participation in processions and feast days, and to the provision of masses at their altar in the town’s collegiate church. Beyond this, they also imagined, built and decorated the fabric of these important buildings. In return they were given security and assurance, first through an altar, and later through a pulpit. They received standing through their particularly-prestigious altar dedication and their position in processions nearest to the sacrament, and they took shelter for their corporate meetings in the town’s kirk. With the Reformation, however, the loss of their altar and meeting space had a direct and lasting impact on the corporate identity of the craftsmen.

Individual women employed performance in parish settings, as well; in Metz, such practices permitted female performers to “write” fresh meanings upon the histories of existing bodies, objects, and spaces. Catherine Gronnaix made sizable foundations at her parish church of St-Martin and at a nearby Celestine monastery; together, these formed an integrated program of liturgy that represented Catherine in the context of personal, family, and public memory. The resulting performances mapped social and spatial geographies onto the buildings and streets of Metz in ways that connected the various family identities that Catherine could claim. Confraternal devotion and material culture also played equally vibrant roles in the parish performances of women, however. Catherine participated in two religious associations at St-Martin and founded masses to be celebrated in their chapels. This chapter brings together these collective practices with the surviving late-medieval elements of the church: sculpture, murals, and windows. Building on recent work that positions devotional images as active objects within performance, it traces the impact of female “matter” and personal practice upon a shared sphere. At St-Martin, bodily performance situated women within privileged places and integrated them into a larger environment of memory, while distinguishing individuals through social and devotional hierarchies.

This chapter bridges the study of individual interactions with outside culture with that of communal responses to Tuscan reform, by investigating the continued importance of piety for educated Jews immersed in the outside world. The first part concentrates on Jewish assistance to the sick and the poor through an exploration of the Livornese Bikur Holim society, showing that changes in Tuscan public health did not diminish the spiritual concerns of benevolent confraternities. The second part evaluates the ways in which traditionally learned physicians, members of the Bikur Holim society, introduced secular themes into devotional settings through a study of the works of Abraham de Bargas and Angelo de Soria. It explores how de Bargas and de Soria negotiated the balance between Jewish culture and "sciences of the gentiles" while working within devotional forms, and which literary and rhetorical strategies allowed them to combine religious and secular forms of knowledge.

This chapter begins by considering some key characteristics of the legacy of Le Bras's first great age of confraternities before focusing on their sixteenth-century crisis. Old confraternities vastly outnumbered new ones in the seventeenth-century church, which found itself seeking ways to bring them into line with more recent religious aspirations and practices. Many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century confraternities viewed themselves as having a long, proud history stretching back to the later middle ages, but this memory frequently ignored long periods of inactivity and even refoundations during the intervening generations, all of which could entail a significant refocusing of their socio-religious practices and objectives along the way. This flexibility and capacity to mutate across time is itself a major reason why confraternities survived for so long, outliving crises that seemed, especially during the sixteenth century, capable of burying them permanently.

Chapter 3 traces how non-elite single women navigated their moral status and developed alliances with the Catholic Church in the shifting religious landscape between 1700 and 1770. Although scholars have examined the ways in which elite women in colonial Spanish America took advantage of loopholes and the distance between public honor and private sexual matters, the experiences of non-elite women remain unclear. Wills highlight how laboring unmarried women invoked feminine ideals other than chastity and enclosure through their enthusiastic participation in confraternities and Third Orders, contributions to the spiritual economy as pious benefactors, and complex alliances with local priests. Much as scholars recognize that race in colonial Latin America was a flexible category and individuals might count multiple racial identities simultaneously or change their racial identity over time, these findings illustrate how poor single women took advantage of alternative feminine ideals and claimed moral status within their communities.

This chapter illustrates how the new fixed-form genres were also cultivated beyond the court, animating the assemblies of bourgeois confraternities in Paris and other urban centres. It explores the ritual activities and lyric outputs of confraternities from Valenciennes in Hainaut, and Paris. Surviving statutes indicate that citation was formalized in puys in the late fourteenth century but evidence from surviving works suggests this was well in place by the 1340s. Along with lyric contests, the Parisian goldsmiths organized annual miracle plays (known as the Miracles de Nostre Dame par personnages) that transmit the texts of religious polyphonic songs. Several of these are shown to have been modeled on secular songs from Jehan Acart de Hesdin's Prise amoureuse of 1332. Additional references to incidental music in the plays provide further testimony to the cultivation of Ars nova polyphony. One song can be matched with an extant work; since the plays are dated, this provides a valuable signpost for our understanding of the development of the Ars nova chanson.

This chapter explores the Iberian orders’ mission in the world and relations with other social groups. Numerous kinds of sources testify that the orders’ warfare, which was crucial to the Reconquest, was understood as a spiritually meritorious activity. Popes, kings, other civil and ecclesiastical leaders, and ordinary people sought to support and even participate in the holy warfare that the orders waged. They also cared for the sick and ransomed captives, activities that were understood, like fighting, to be expressions of charity for one’s neighbor. One of the principal ways the orders shared their spiritual merit with others, as well as obtained material support, was through relations of confraternity with laymen. From the late thirteenth century, the orders experienced problems in carrying out their mission and in retaining the support of the faithful.

This chapter explores the factors and conditions that facilitated ethnic cohesion among the ethnically diverse native population and the development of indigenous civic life from the midto late sixteenth century. Indigenous migrants adopted and negotiated colonial spaces and institutions to re-create central Mexican–style indigenous communities and establish a corporate Indian status, allowing them to draw on concessions and protective measures afforded to native peoples under colonial rule. The evolution of a “Republic de Indios,” barrios of native communities on the outskirts of the city, created spaces where native peoples could practice indigenous and Spanish lifeways. Shared housing and labor arrangements unified the native population through personal and professional ties. The establishment of indigenous confraternities allowed native peoples to develop formal social and political organizations. Even as native peoples began assuming the role of urban vecinos, or municipal residents, they continued to identify with their ancestral heritage.

Chapter two examines the phenomenon of the rapid growth of the foundation of hospitals in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. A comprehensive consideration of these hospitals’ foundational charters provides insight into the location, purpose, need, and political context of the origins of the hospital movement. Various founders including bishops, confraternities, individuals and neighbourhood associations as well as the differences between rural and urban facilities are considered. The geographic importance of pilgrimage and trade routes to the establishment of hospitals is also explored.