This is the third major volume of collected essays on Italian confraternities to emerge in the space of two years (the others are John Patrick Donnelly S. J. and Michael W. Maher, S. J., eds., Confraternities and Catholic Reform in Italy, France, and Spain, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies 44 [Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 1999]; and Nicholas Terpstra, ed., The Politics of Ritual Kinship: Confraternities and Social Order in Early Modern Italy, [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000]). It is a tribute to the editors of this new volume that notwithstanding the appearance of these other collections, Confraternities and the Visual Arts: Ritual, Spectacle, Image marks an important and original contribution to the field of confraternity studies.

Confraternities have now occupied a central position in the historiography of late-medieval and early modern Italy for more than a generation, and there is no hint that scholarly interest in these lay-devotional organizations is waning. On the contrary, there are signs that the study of confraternities is in something of a transitional phase. Modern study of confraternities was defined and consolidated by fundamental research carried out in the 1970s and 1980s, which established beyond any doubt the importance of this form of organized lay devotion in the urban environment of premodern Italy. The definitive work is still that by Ronald F. E. Weissman: Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence (New York: Academic Press, 1982).

In addition to its methodological originality, the pioneering scholarship on early modern confraternities was concerned with establishing solid ground rules. As a result, this research, and the torrent of publications that it spawned, has revealed much about the institutional structures and rules by which confraternities were organized and governed, the nature and significance of their rituals, their relationship to the civic and neighborhood life of the towns in which they flourished, and their role in providing an outlet for the pious impulses of large numbers, if not the majority, of late-medieval and early modern townspeople. (A comprehensive survey and synthesis of the conclusions yielded by the renaissance in confraternity studies is Christopher Black, Italian Confraternities in the Sixteenth Century [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989].)

The achievements of this phase of confraternal scholarship mean that there is now less justification than before for straight institutional histories of confraternities, but the field continues to present new challenges. Not the least of these is, in this reviewer’s opinion, how the data contained in specifically confraternal sources may be interpreted in light of recent developments in cultural history, so as to illuminate areas of Italian urban existence not usually associated with the confraternities themselves. The editors Barbara Wisch and Diane Cole Ahl are clearly of the same mind. They state early that “as the sub-title of the volume—Ritual, Spectacle, Image—suggests, confraternal patronage must be studied by reintegrating works of art into the rich cultural and social contexts from which they emerged, using ritual and spectacle as crucial interpretative strategies” (4). The organization of the book represents an attempt to respond to the challenges presented by the field as it currently stands. The essays have been chosen as examples of the ways in which scholars are currently undertaking the task of relating confraternities to their wider social setting. In general, the process of selection has been judiciously handled, and the volume as a whole is replete with suggestions—both direct and implicit—as to the directions in which future research may now develop.

Confraternities and the Visual Arts comprises eleven essays, all of them case studies, written by both historians and art historians. The contributions are arranged “chronologically, geographically, and thematically,” and they cover issues including gender, religion, theater, ritual, and social and artistic patronage in Italian confraternities “from the Trecento through the early Seicento” (4). For the most part, the authors fulfill the editors’ ambition to push the boundaries of the field while advancing knowledge of the specific themes that they treat. Most deal in important ways with confraternities in relation to visual and material culture, and concentrate on the elusive dynamic that existed between confraternal members and the spaces they occupied, or the objects that they commissioned, saw, handled, and venerated. Louise Marshall’s essay, which functions as an excellent “keynote address” to the volume, skillfully locates its interpretation of the visual representation and use of fourteenth-century plague saints within the broader picture of the contemporary society and, in particular, its urban spaces. Ahl’s essay, “Art and Devotion in the Compagnia della Purificazione e di San Zanobi of Florence,” associates the relationship between one confraternity’s youthful membership and the many objects the company possessed, with important themes in the late-fifteenth-century religious and civic history of Florence. Succeeding Ahl’s contribution is a chapter by Konrad Eisenbichler. His essay is a useful discussion of the way in which the youth company of the Archangel Raphael acquired many of its furnishings, paintings, and other accoutrements in the course of a long and sometimes tumultuous institutional history. In the course of his analysis, Eisenbichler sheds further light on the “family tree” of Florence’s confraternities, a genealogy about which one would like to know much more.

Nicholas Terpstra has produced a typically far-reaching study: his analysis of confraternal charities is an impressively nuanced evocation of the urban texture of confraternal experience in late-Renaissance Bologna, and it adds yet another layer to this scholar’s already major contribution to current knowledge of Bologna. Most importantly, perhaps, Terpstra’s contribution militates against any monolithic understanding of Italian confraternities by providing further evidence of the subtle variety that characterized their activities in different cities.

Randi Klebanoff also focuses on Bologna. Her analysis of Niccolò dell’ Arca’s striking terra-cotta ensemble of the Lamentation over the Dead Christ is a masterful blend of iconographic interpretation and subtle scholarship. Nerida Newbigin’s essay on the plays performed by the Roman confraternity of the Gonfalone, meanwhile, is paired with Wisch’s more focused consideration of the same confraternity’s sixteenth-century Crucifixion by Rovigo Spagnuolo. Taken together, these two essays constitute one of the volume’s most convincing treatments of how the significance of confraternal rituals evolved in relation to changing historical circumstances.

In their introduction, Wisch and Ahl adduce the role of women in confraternities as a prime example of a theme that until recently has been elided by the scholarship. As the editors observe, the task of writing about women is rendered difficult by the fact that even where there are indications that they played an important role, the exact nature of women’s participation is difficult to grasp because of the male membership’s reluctance to discuss their female consorelle in official confraternal records (1–2). The book contains much material on this vital aspect of confraternal life, including two direct responses in the form of the essays by Eunice D. Howe and Lance G. Lazar (respectively: “Appropriating Space: Woman’s Place in Confraternal Life at Santo Spirito in Sassia, Rome,” and “ ‘E faucibus daemonis’: Daughters of Prostitutes, the First Jesuits, and the Compagnia delle Vergini Miserabili di Santa Caterina della Rosa”).

Despite its strengths, however, the volume is not wholly successful. While eight of the volume’s essays are deliberately paired so as to throw major themes into relief, the result is not always as felicitous as with the Newbigin/Wisch combination. Anne Matchette’s essay on the meeting-place of the Florentine confraternity of the Purificazione e di San Zanobi relies so heavily on the substance of Ahl’s preceding essay on art and ritual in the same company that one almost wonders why Matchette’s was included. The same problem undermines the essay by the late Louise Smith Bross on the company of the Vergini Miserabili di Santa Caterina della Rosa, which repeats information from Lazar’s preceding essay. The tragic circumstances that attended the completion of this pair of essays surely created unique—and perhaps intractable—difficulties, but the relative weakness of the Ahl/Matchette combination suggests in a more general sense that a stronger editorial hand was required.

Confraternities and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Italy is nonetheless a valuable contribution both to the study of confraternities and to our broader understanding of the reception and use of visual culture by a number of contemporary lay audiences. Taken as a whole, the volume offers a coherent vision of one of the most vital aspects of Italian urban society from the Black Death through the Counter Reformation. It is certainly an indispensable resource for all who work on the culture of late medieval and early modern Italian society, regardless of their area of specialization.