Since the 1960s lay confraternities in Italy, as elsewhere, have moved from the periphery of medieval religious history to a central place in mainstream studies of social-religious and cultural history up to the eighteenth century. In the early 1960s a student of medieval and Renaissance Italy might have known about confraternities as part of the broader flagellant movement exploding on the scene from 1260; or as contributors to the cultural scene of fourteenth-and fifteenth-century Florence, if they recognized Or San Michele as a confraternity building, or sixteenth century Venice – if it was realized that Scuola in the context of, say San Rocco, meant a confraternity and not an educational school. Now it is recognized that confraternities expanded and diversified in Italy through the later medieval, Renaissance, Catholic Reform, and Counter Reformation periods that in this volume are subsumed under the broader term of Early Modern. The Reformation crisis period that saw the collapse of the fraternities or religious guilds (or gilds) in Protestant areas of Germany, in England, and in Scotland, witnessed a major diversification of their roles and activities in Italy, as in Spain and later France.

Confraternities were central to the spiritual life of many urban inhabitants, female as well as male, and more patchily to remoter rural dwellers. They were a key link between the living and the dead.