Between the twelfth and the eighteenth centuries Italians frequently joined ‘confraternities’ which made them symbolic brothers and sisters to one another. These kin groups launched extensive charitable programmes, directed civic and religious rituals, and socialized members in class and gender roles. These essays examine how medieval religious and political values shaped early ritual kinship, how sixteenth-century social change and religious reform transformed confraternities, and how these altered groups became key agents in achieving the more rigid social order of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

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.