Konrad Eisenbichler Research Articles

:The Boys of the Archangel Raphael: A Youth Confraternity in Florence, 1411- 1785

Confraternities and their contribution to the fabric of society have become invisible history for us today. Although their activities began in the Renaissance and continued until the end of the Enlightenment, confraternities have not yet found a place in the standard histories of the period, or even in the histories of religion or of the Church. With The Boys of the Archangel Raphael, Konrad Eisenbichler brings to light the daily life and history of one such organization from its founding in 1411 to its final suppression in 1785. While focusing on the Compagnia dell'Arcangelo Raffaello, the first confraternity to be established in Florence, the author also discusses other, similar organizations. By constantly comparing developments across several confraternities, the book provides us with insight into the entire phenomenon of premodern lay religious associations for youths. The study is firmly grounded on archival and contemporary documents, and covers a variety of fields of interest: social history, church history, the history of childhood, and the history of art, literature, and music. The Boys of the Archangel Raphael will be the authoritative work on youth confraternities for years to come. Winner of the Howard R. Marraro Prize of the American Catholic Historical Association.

Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West (review)

Reviews 283 the expectations of the readership shaped the literary qualities and content of the correspondence is perhaps given less weight than it deserves. But it is still a milestone in the analysis of Byzantine letter-writing. The work gives a useful overview of ByzantineBulgarian history and the administrative complexities of the Bulgarian region, but its main strength is in the novel approach to Byzantine epistolography, in the attempt to demonstrate that far from being vacuous and unintelligible literary exercises, Theophylact's letters (like those of so m a n y Byzantine writers) performed a very specific, practical and effective role in the author's fulfillment of his ecclesiastical duties and the maintenance of a sophisticated and complex network of political and intellectual contacts. Lynda Garland School of Classics and History University ofNew England Murray, Jacqueline and Konrad Eisenbichler, ed., Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West, Toronto/Buffalo London, University of Toronto Press, 1996; pp. 315; R.R.P. US$60.00, -£44.50 (cloth), US$21.95, £15.95 (paper). This collection of essays issued out of the conference 'Sex and Sexuality in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance', held in 1991 at the University of Toronto. Eclectic in disciplinary orientations and methodological approaches as such productions often are, these essays are nonetheless generally characterised by a concern to take issues of sexual discipline, identity, desire arid experience as the subject of inquiry. A lucid Introduction by Jacqueline Murray and Vern L. Bullough's more personal reflections in 'Sex in History: 284 Reviews a Redux' locate the subsequent articles within a clearly drawn field. In particular, the Introduction offers a neat review of historiography and epistemology and Murray's footnotes are well worth perusing for their directions to other literature and additional musings on current debates. Bullough's anecdotal comments on potential sources and possible approaches may have lost something in the transition from spoken to written form, but his recollections as a researcher on sexual topics before sexuality was 'respectable' allows an insight into the experiences of a senior scholar which is unusual and refreshing. The essays are arranged in thematic groupings, the first focussing on legal norms and moral codes. In this cluster, James Brundage provides a useful overview of the development of legal machinery to enforce sexual discipline, offering a broad framework in which to locate the growing number of studies of local and provincial courts. Shifting the perspective from the European to the regional, Roberto J. Gonzalez-Casanovas establishes the ideological centrality of sexual control to the maintenance of social and political order in thirteenth-century Castile. For those unable to access the literature dealing with medieval Spain, this close reading of Alfonso X's legal code Siete partidas, is very welcome and includes a valuable appendix of passages from the source with English translations. Also drawing on fascinating material, Ivana Elb ventures into the Portuguese settlements of West Africa to trace the tensions between legal prescription and social reality in fifteenth and sixteenth-century sexual arrangements. Turning to sixteenth-century London, Carol Kazmierczak Manzione proposes that civic governors of institutions such as Bridewell adopted 'moral policing' as a preventative strategy against poverty, and hence the need to supply poor relief. Essays exploring gendered sexualities and desires stand at Reviews 285 the centre of this collection. The nature of premodern understandings of sexuality, and particularly male same-sex desire, are central to the articles by Robert Shephard, Joseph Cady and Guy Poirier. Working from the perspective of sexuality as a discursive formation, Shepherd's comparison of rumours concerning the sexual reputations of Elizabeth I and James I argues that the paucity of gossip (in contemporary sources) directed at the latter demonstrates that his friendships with males were not generally regarded as sexual relationships. In direct contrast to Shephard's conclusions, Cady ruthlessly pursues the thesis that a recognition of homosexuality, as an identity or sexual orientation, can be identified in the late-sixteenth century Memoires-Journaux of Pierre de l'Estoile, an official at the court of Henri III. In the third article in this cluster, Poirier's exploration of orientalising stereotypes in Renaissance French travel literature makes no explicit claims...

The Boys of the Archangel Raphael. A Youth Confraternity in Florence, 1411-1785 (review)

152 Reviews house is too narrow' and with the exclusiveness of the 'men's hall'. Both these larger themes are, it is stressed, concerned to stress the (re-)establishment of order and the value or limitations ofritualspace, the last encapsulated in the opposed notions of 'the hall' (oddly churchlike) as opposed to 'the huf. The last is characterised as 'a space containing w o m e n , kinship, fertility, sex, agriculture, food, sleep and night . . . an earthen place, suited to our earthen natures, male and female' (p. 119), whereas the hall is to be seen as 'regressive'. The latter part of the study is concerned with psychoanalytic matters including: the degree of (Aristotelian) identification with the hero; the degree of relinquishment/cure possible for the audience/reader; the Augustine-like analysis of the soul being assisted by our reading of Freud, Gilson and Ricoeur; and the ethics of civilization (p. 166)—deemed to be explored or probed by the Beowulf poet The conclusion to his study is both a personal confession of resentful attitudes to authority and Earl's satisfaction at the hero's freedom, the latter being seen as that of the epic poet himself. Further, it is the speculative critic's perceptive concluding notion that 'the poem invites a mediation on the unconscious themes of our o w n individual and cultural origins' (p. 188). While the first half of the text considers very freshly such concepts as space, time, history and orality, the second is informed by psychoanalytic anthropology and by all creative notions of heroic autonomy. 'Provocative', 'challenging' and 'reflective' are more appropriate epithets to describe this theoretical study than when they are applied to other interpretations of this now, perhaps, less enigmatic and most perdurable of Old English poems. J. S. Ryan School of English, Communication and Theatre University of N e w England Eisenbichler, Konrad, The Boys of the Archangel Raphael. A Youth Confrater in Florence, 1411-1785, Toronto, Toronto University Press, 1998; cloth; pp. xi, 474; 8 plates. R.R.P. $US55.00. Over the last twenty-five years lay religious confraternities of the late medieval and Early Modern period have become one of the most fertile and innovative fields of historical research. Until the early 1970s, despite being one of the most ubiquitous forms of association in western Christendom, confraternities were neglected even by those historians w h o ransacked confraternal archives for evidence of the artistic, literary and musical works they commissioned and produced. M u c h of the credit for their revaluation must be given to anglophone historians w h o were first to realise the social and political importance of confraternities. Since then, a number of major monographs and numerous shorter studies have appeared. Few aspects of Reviews 153 confraternal life have remained unexplored. Our knowledge of confraternities has expanded prodigiously and with it the knowledge of the societies in which they operated. Prof. Konrad Eisenbichler has been at the forefront of this process of revaluation, pioneering archival research in Florentine youth confraternities. For more thanfifteenyears he has published numerous seminal studies in the field. H e has organised sessions on various aspects of confraternal life at international conferences in both North America and Italy. H e has founded a journal, Confraternitas, and a library, at Victoria University within the University of Toronto, wholly dedicated to confraternal studies. H e has acted as adviser, archival informant and mentor to countless post-graduate students and colleagues grappling with problems posed by their research on confraternities. H e has become, in short, the acknowledged international expert on all matters connected with Florentine confraternities in general and youth confraternities in particular. The expertise and unrivalled knowledge acquired in these years are much in evidence in the book under review. The Boys of the Archangel Raphael has many features which render it invaluable to scholars. It is the first full-length study devoted to a youth confraternity. It is to m y knowledge the only scholarly work analysing a confraternity, regardless of type, for the whole period of its existence. It is the first truly multi-disciplinary study of a confraternity to have appeared. Furthermore, unlike previous historians of Florentine youth confraternities...

Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West ed. by Jacqueline Murray and Konrad Eisenbichler

Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West ed. by Jacqueline Murray and Konrad Eisenbichler

Konrad Eisenbichler, ed. Crossing the Boundaries: Christian Piety and the Arts in Italian Medieval and Renaissance Confraternities. (Early Drama, Art, and Music Monograph Series, 15.) Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1991. 41 pls. + ix + 274 pp. $26.95 hardcover; $16.95 paper.

Konrad Eisenbichler, ed. Crossing the Boundaries: Christian Piety and the Arts in Italian Medieval and Renaissance Confraternities. (Early Drama, Art, and Music Monograph Series, 15.) Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1991. 41 pls. + ix + 274 pp. 16.95 paper. - Volume 48 Issue 2

Gli araldi della commedia: Teatro a Firenze nel Rinascimento by Paola Ventrone

260Comparative Drama Paola Ventrone. GIi araldi délia commedia: Teatro a Firenze nel Rinascimento. Ospedaletto (Pisa): Pacini Editore, 1993. Pp. 219. Paola Ventrone's volume on theater in Florence in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries constitutes one of the most significant and original recent contributions to the field. Based as it is not only on the author's many years of research in the archives, but also on her own firm view of theater as more than mere literature or simple script, it paints an extensive, complex, and at the same time wonderfully detailed picture of theatrical activity in the city. The author sees theater as a function of civic life and as a reflection of profound social or anthropological currents. As a result, theater and city become closely linked in her analysis, one serving the other's interests and contributing to each other's self-definition. In order to examine such conjunctions and symbiotic relationships, the author not only has examined a variety of archival and manuscript sources but also has re-examined well known documents so as to re-construct the context and the dynamics that gave life to theater in Florence. For example, the first chapter opens with an examination of "The myth of the princely patron" as it applies to Lorenzo de' Medici, only to conclude that the sporadic nature of his patronage of spectacle argues more against than in favor of the traditional view of his contribution to Florentine festivities. The "tradition" of Medicean jousts is then immediately exposed as an example of one such myth. Ventrone's volume is not, however, just revisionist history. It is also an excellent exploration of what constitutes theater in an early modern society. A few traditional concepts of "theater" as expressed and formulated by historians of literature fall by the wayside in such a process. As the author herself points out, the concept of "genres" gives way to a polymorphous "corn-presence" (compresenza) that functions dialectically between continuity and transformation to foster the development of "spectacle" (p. 9). In her view, not only jousts but also religious processions and even the narration of novelle in private gatherings or the recitation of cantan on the Piazza di San Martino become part of the tradition. In Ventrone's book the contributions made to the development of theater and spectacle by individuals such as the poet and philologist Angelo Poliziano or the ousted Florentine secretary Niccolö Machiavelli share the covers with those of lay religious confraternities or of carefree "compagnie di piacere." And, to add a new twist to an old story, an unexpected character has been allowed to slip in: the Herald of the Florentine Republic, whose duties were not only to represent the Republic in public embassies or events but also to entertain with songs and recitation the magistrates at banquet in the Palazzo della Signoria. With his entry into the cast of characters the title of the volume turns into a pun and the history of theater in Florence gains a new player. There are very few criticisms indeed to be levelled at the volume. Reviews261 Given the wealth of manuscript and printed sources cited or mentioned in the notes, a bibliography at the end of the volume would have been very informative and welcomed. Similarly, all long Latin quotes should have been translated into Italian (the days of general scholarly fluency in Latin are—alas—long gone, even in Italy). In spite of such observations , any other criticisms or regrets that could be levelled at this volume are truly overshadowed by the enormous contribution it makes to the history of theater and spectacle in Renaissance Florence. KONRAD EISENBICHLER Victoria College, University of Toronto Molly Smith. The Darker World Within: Evil in the Tragedies of Shakespeare and His Successors. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991. Pp. 193. $32.50. Cynthia Marshall. Last Things and Last Plays: Shakespearean Eschatology . Carbondale: South Illinois University Press, 1991. Pp. xv + 142. $24.50. The representation of humanity's seemingly endless capacity for nastiness, commonly known as evil in former times, is undoubtedly a dominant phenomenon in drama of the early Stuart period. Molly Smith's study centers quite strongly on the...

Scripts and Scenarios: The Performance of Comedy in Renaissance Italy by Richard Andrews

Reviews533 tions of its audience. But if all I keep hearing is how wicked the theater has been, what I think of is Plato, Tertullian, Stephen Gosson, and Jeremy Collier, and my reaction is, "It can't be that bad." Or the Puritans that right. WILLIAM GRUBER Emory University ' Franco Moretti, "? Huge Eclipse': Tragic Form and the Deconsecration of Sovereignty," Genre. 15 (1982), 7-8. Richard Andrews. Scripts and Scenarios: The Performance of Comedy in Renaissance Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. xiii + 298. $59.95. Previous scholars, and in particular Douglas Radcliff-Umstead in 1969 and Marzia Pieri in 1989, have already viewed sixteenth-century Italy as the place where modern theater was born. In seeking to bring together Italian scripted and improvised comedy of the sixteenth century , Professor Andrews provides not only a new description of such a birth, but also a thorough introduction to, and history of the two most successful dramatic genres ofthat period, the commedia erudita and the commedia dell' arte. The author begins his study with a backward glance into the fifteenth century to review the political context and the intellectual assumptions that led to the first performances of revived and original Latin comedies in cities such as Florence, Ferrara, Rome, and Mantua. He then rightly adopts a chronological approach and, stepping directly into the sixteenth century, explores the first "regular" comedies in Italian. Throughout the volume, the analysis of theatrical developments is preceded by brief but informative summaries of the historical context in which such developments were set. The Sack of Rome or the Congress of Bologna, for example, are thus seen as watershed events for theater as well as politics. And the Catholic Reformation is never far from the footlights. While a discussion of scripted learned comedy (commedia erudita) could easily be limited to plays composed in the first half of the century, the treatment of improvised professional comedy (commedia dell'arte) breaks past the mid-century mark and enters fully into the drastically different world of post-Tridentine Italy. The author argues that, in spite of the major cultural and political changes now affecting Italian theater, comedy continued to hold the stage by way of the constant dialogue between the two genres. The scenarios of the professional actors are clearly indebted to the scripts of their learned amateur predecessors. And the learned comedy which was written in the second half of the century was, in turn, indebted to the heightened sense of 534Comparative Drama theater displayed by the commedia dell' arte troupes. At this point the author casts a distant passing glance at Shakespeare and Molière, but only to tantalize his readers. The volume ends with one of the epitomes of Renaissance Italian theater, the Medici wedding of 1589, an event that really does deserve a book all to itself. The volume is thus both an excellent introduction to sixteenthcentury Italian theater and an innovative approach to the development from amateur learned comedy to professional comic theater. The emphasis it places on the texts as works to be performed rather than as literature to be analyzed is a welcome change and a solid contribution to the history of Italian theater in the Renaissance. And in its synthetic, chronological approach it is so highly suitable for class adoptions that one hopes the publisher will soon offer it in a paperback version. KONRAD EISENBICHLER Victoria College, University of Toronto Paul Whitfield White. Theatre and Reformation: Protestantism, Patronage , and Plaxing in Tudor England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press," 1993. Pp. xvii + 268. $59.95. In this wide-ranging survey of about fifty years of theater history Professor White has dealt with many aspects of Tudor theater concentrating primarily on the publication of the plays and their production in relation to Protestant government propaganda. He has looked particularly at the plays of John Bale, Lewis and William Wager, and a number of other writers of interludes. He attempts to broaden the base of knowledge concerning the performance and the popularity of the polemical plays, and engages with the somewhat divided Protestant attitude to the writing and acting of plays. This last is a fruitful area for investigation, and White has assembled an interesting body...

Konrad Eisenbichler, ed., Crossing the Boundaries: Christian Piety and the Arts in Italian Medieval and Renaissance Confraternities. (Early Drama, Art, and Music, 15.) Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1991. Pp. xi, 275; 41 black-and-white plates following text. $26.95 (cloth); $16.95 (paper).

Konrad Eisenbichler, ed., Crossing the Boundaries: Christian Piety and the Arts in Italian Medieval and Renaissance Confraternities. (Early Drama, Art, and Music, 15.) Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1991. Pp. xi, 275; 41 black-and-white plates following text. $26.95 (cloth); $16.95 (paper).