Brotherhood and Boundaries: Lay Religion and Europe's Expansion in the Renaissance and Early Modern Period

19-20 September 2008

Scuola Normale Superiore
Palazzo della Carovana
Piazza dei Cavalieri, 7
Pisa

Sponsored by Scuola Normale Superiore and the University of Toronto

Recent scholarship has explored the actions of confraternities as agents of lay piety, civic religion, and church reform within the Catholic world.  Yet social kinship groups were found in many different religious and national communities, in many different social communities, and in many different institutional contexts.  They both expressed and mediated the tensions that arose at a time of extraordinary historical change.  This conference will explore the activities of social kinship groups in various religious, national, cultural, and social communities from the fourteenth through the eighteenth centuries, with a focus on those groups that aimed to either bridge or defend boundaries of one sort or another. 

We seek papers that explore confraternities’ activities in cross-cultural contexts both within Europe and in those parts of the world where the European presence is expanding.  We are particularly interested in exploring the dynamics that result from action across various boundaries, such as:

1. Global Boundaries:  confraternities in Asia, Africa, and the Americas – missions and resistance.
2. Social Boundaries:  relations between clerics and laity, between patricians and subordinates, between men & women, between urban and rural.
3. Political Boundaries:  Confraternities as agents of civil society, as vehicles of social capital, or as agents of social & political control.
4. Religious Boundaries:  Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, and Orthodox confraternities – protective space, social and cultural resource, site of resistance, or vehicle of dialogue?  What are the tensions and mediations?  How do confraternities define and manage sacred space?  What happens to confraternities in Protestant Europe?
5. Ecclesiastical Boundaries:  Lay & clerical relations – issues of culture & control before and after Trent; the shifting nature of civic religion.

Conference Chairs

Adriano Prosperi

Nicholas Terpstra

Languages of the Conference:  Italian & English