The Transformation of the Laity in Bergamo, 1265-c. 1400.
Schutte, Anne Jacobson
Roisin Cossar. The Transformation of the Laity in Bergamo, 1265-c.
1400.
The Medieval Mediterranean: Peoples, Economies and Cultures,
400-1500, 63. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2006. xiv + 228 pp.
index. bibl. $116. ISBN: 90-04-15222-9.
Since its beginnings in the mid-1970s, the study of medieval and
early modern confraternities has come a long way. At first, it focused
exclusively on statutes. By publishing numerous founding documents and
later revisions of them, an ongoing effort, participants in this field
of research have made a valuable contribution. Statute history, however,
has inherent limitations. Obviously, prescriptive sources can shed no
light on who members of lay devotional and charitable organizations were
and what they actually did. To discover which social groups joined and
led confraternities, whether and to what extent women and clerics
participated in them, to what kinds of devotional and charitable
activities they devoted themselves, and how these features changed over
time, it is necessary to scrutinize other, non-prescriptive sources--as
the more sophisticated and perceptive students of confraternities have
recently been doing.
With this monograph, Roisin Cossar joins the vanguard of
confraternity studies and scholarship on the laity and religion. As her
title indicates, she focuses on Bergamo, a city in northwestern Italy,
during a "long" fourteenth century. At the beginning of her
period, Bergamo was an independent commune; in the middle of it (1332),
the Visconti of Milan became its overlords. (Later, in 1428, the city
and its hinterland would be annexed by the expanding Venetian Republic.)
Making ingenious use of abundant documentary material preserved in
Bergamo, above all notarial records, Cossar conducts a socially
differentiated, diachronic examination of lay religious activities in
this late medieval city.
The Misericordia Maggiore (MIA) features prominently in
Cossar's study. Founded in 1265, the MIA almost immediately became
Bergamo's largest and most powerful confraternity. Over the course
of the fourteenth century, led by prominent male citizens who served
simultaneously as officers of the confraternity and of the commune, the
MIA assumed direction over other lay religious groups' affairs. Its
notaries redacted a growing number and proportion of Bergamasque
testaments and supervised their execution. In the process, it
increasingly wielded social control over testators' heirs as well
as beneficiaries of its own charitable initiatives.
Membership in the MIA and other Bergamasque confraternities was
open to men of all social ranks. Some, though not all, confraternities
admitted women, but they were never allowed to participate in directing
confraternal operations. Until about the middle of the fourteenth
century, women and poor men had considerable opportunity to exercise
agency in another type of institution: hospitals. On entering hospitals,
women donated their property, reserving to themselves lifetime income
from it. Living there, they formed intimate bonds with other female
residents and often took part in administering the institutions. Male
residents of hospitals demanded good treatment, sometimes bringing suit
in order to obtain it. Reforms conducted by ecclesiastical officials and
directors of the MIA in the 1360s and 1370s, however, relegated women
and poor men in hospitals and those who received charity outside them to
subservient, passive roles. Carefully scrutinized for their
"worthiness" and suspected of misrepresenting their need for
help, they had less and less voice in how they were treated.
Cossar's final chapter, "Testaments, Gender, and
Religious Culture," exemplifies the skill, sophistication, and good
judgment exhibited throughout the book. She has a firm grasp on what
readers need to know: at this point, how testaments were shaped, and how
one can ferret out testators' voices. When direct quotation of
Latin documents is needed, she provides it. Adeptly employing
conditional and subjunctive verbs and qualifying adverbs to indicate
what may have been the case, she nonetheless mounts a strong, clear
argument. Respectfully but firmly, she compares and contrasts her
findings with those of previous scholars: James Banker, Daniel
Bornstein, Robert Brentano, Samuel Cohn, and Augustine Thompson in
particular.
In summary, The Transformation of the Laity in Bergamo, 1265-c.
1400 is a marvelous book. The only players who remain in the
shadows--probably because available sources reveal little about
them--are professed members of religious orders. Rather than chanting
the ritual lament about the high prices publishers charge these days,
let me simply encourage all readers of this review to recommend that
their libraries acquire it.
ANNE JACOBSON SCHUTTE
University of Virginia, Emerita
