Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction The Politics of Ritual Kinship
- 1 The development of confraternity studies over the past thirty years
- 2 Homosociality and civic (dis)order in late medieval Italian confraternities
- 3 Confraternities and lay female religiosity in late medieval and Renaissance Umbria
- 4 The bounds of community: commune, parish, confraternity, and charity at the dawn of a new era in Cortona
- 5 Men and women in Roman confraternities in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: roles, functions, expectations
- 6 The Medici and the youth Confraternity of the Purification of the Virgin, 1434–1506
- 7 In loco parentis: confraternities and abandoned children in Florence and Bologna
- 8 The first Jesuit confraternities and marginalized groups in sixteenth-century Rome
- 9 Jewish confraternal piety in sixteenth-century Ferrara: continuity and change
- 10 The scuole piccole of Venice: formations and transformations
- 11 Relaunching confraternities in the Tridentine era: shaping conscience and Christianizing society in Milan and Lombardy
- 12 The development of Jesuit confraternity activity in the Kingdom of Naples in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
- 13 Corpus Domini: ritual metamorphoses and social changes in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Genoa
- 14 Faith's boundaries: ritual and territory in rural Piedmont in the early modern period
- 15 The suppression of confraternities in Enlightenment Florence
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ITALIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE
8 - The first Jesuit confraternities and marginalized groups in sixteenth-century Rome
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction The Politics of Ritual Kinship
- 1 The development of confraternity studies over the past thirty years
- 2 Homosociality and civic (dis)order in late medieval Italian confraternities
- 3 Confraternities and lay female religiosity in late medieval and Renaissance Umbria
- 4 The bounds of community: commune, parish, confraternity, and charity at the dawn of a new era in Cortona
- 5 Men and women in Roman confraternities in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: roles, functions, expectations
- 6 The Medici and the youth Confraternity of the Purification of the Virgin, 1434–1506
- 7 In loco parentis: confraternities and abandoned children in Florence and Bologna
- 8 The first Jesuit confraternities and marginalized groups in sixteenth-century Rome
- 9 Jewish confraternal piety in sixteenth-century Ferrara: continuity and change
- 10 The scuole piccole of Venice: formations and transformations
- 11 Relaunching confraternities in the Tridentine era: shaping conscience and Christianizing society in Milan and Lombardy
- 12 The development of Jesuit confraternity activity in the Kingdom of Naples in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
- 13 Corpus Domini: ritual metamorphoses and social changes in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Genoa
- 14 Faith's boundaries: ritual and territory in rural Piedmont in the early modern period
- 15 The suppression of confraternities in Enlightenment Florence
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ITALIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE
Summary
This article explores the ideological sources of Jesuit missionary activity by focusing on three of the first Jesuit confraternities founded in the 1540s in Rome. These confraternities administered houses for reformed prostitutes, daughters of prostitutes, and newly converted Jews and Muslims, and became the models for similar institutions throughout Italy. They illustrate a central feature of the Jesuit urban apostolate: to enlist elites in the reform of the most “public” sinners living on the margins of society. Focusing on these institutions also helps to recover women's roles in Catholic reform, to measure attitudes toward subcultures perceived as threatening, and to provide a clearer picture of the Jesuits and their relations with the laity generally.
Prostitutes, Jews, and Muslims stood out as symbols of the need for conversion because they were highly visible figures considered to be outside God's grace. By 1542, Ignatius Loyola established a new kind of institution, the Casa di Santa Marta, as a shelter where former prostitutes and battered women could stay before deciding whether to become a nun, to be reconciled with their husbands, or to get married; its administration was entrusted to a confraternity, the Compagnia della grazia. Almost simultaneously, a second confraternal shelter, the Conservatorio di Santa Caterina delle vergini miserabili, was established for the daughters of prostitutes and other young women who were thought to be in danger of turning to prostitution.
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- The Politics of Ritual KinshipConfraternities and Social Order in Early Modern Italy, pp. 132 - 149Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999