Belief, Devotion, and Memory in Early Modern Italian Confraternities

Abstract

Scholars interested in understanding and explaining changes in European culture and Christian practice from 1400 to 1800 have confronted the problem of belief in a variety of ways.1 Up through the 1960s, in Northern Europe traditional approaches seeking to account for the Reformation often continued to regard theology as queen of the sciences, but since then social historical methods emphasizing a broad array of non-religious motivations and influences in explaining religious change have taken the foreground.2 In Italy, considerations of Renaissance society since the formulation of Jacob Burckhardt have often emphasized secularization as a primary category, establishing it as the precursor of modern de-christianized or even post-Christian society.3 Once again, however, scholars both above and below the Alps interested in understanding and explaining the shifts in religious practice are seeking new models in the sociology of religion to re-incorporate belief into our broadest schemes of Early Modern religious change.4