This rich collection of articles on early modern confraternities is the tangible result of a very successful conference held at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa in September 2008. Given the location and the participants, most of the thirty-three articles in the volume focus on Italian brotherhoods, but not all: Magda Teter, for example, examines religious and secular spaces for Jews and Christians in Poland (215–24), Margaret King discusses piety and politics in sodalities of the Blessed Virgin in the Spanish Netherlands (351–68), Alexis Fontbonne looks at Holy Spirit confraternities in the French cities of Clermont and Montferrand (51–67), María Álvarez Fernández writes on Castilian confraternities in Oviedo (405–22), Portugal is represented by two articles, one by Isabel Dos Guimarães Sá on the connections between confraternities, prisons, and hospitals (171–89), the other by Giuseppe Marcocci on confraternities for slaves in Lisbon (369–85), Colm Lennon moves the discussion to Ireland with an article on civic and religious sodalities on the emerald isle (509–18), Susan Verdi Webster’s discussion on ethnicity transfers the discussion to colonial Quito and its confraternity of the Rosary (387–98), while Juan O. Mesquida takes the reader all the way to the Philippines with a contribution on the confraternity of the Misericordia in Manila (519–39). There are also two excellent articles on non-Christian confraternities, one by Kenneth Stow on changes in Jewish confraternities in Italy (121–31), the other by Federica Francesconi on women in Jewish confraternities (191–214).

The geographical spread of the articles is matched by their chronological reach from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, and from the medieval origins of confraternities to their various transformations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries under the impact of political changes, Tridentine reforms, and social developments. And while some contributors paint a very detailed picture of one particular sodality or one particular moment, others contribute a synthesis that sketches in quick strokes a broad picture of the confraternal movement in a region (Liana Bertoldi Lenoci, 541–47) or the complex relationship between confraternities and the Church (Danilo Zardin, 569–92).

This variety of contributions is held together by the question of boundaries that create brotherhood. In bringing the devout together into a brotherhood, the confraternity was, at the same time, separating them from the rest of society, thereby creating a self-defined elite that stood apart from the rest. Membership in a brotherhood defined an individual by separating him from his normal context. As the articles in the collection also point out, this need to band together not only to pray, but also to carry out a charitable activity for the benefit of the larger, civic community was most profoundly felt when the secular or religious powers were either weak or absent; over time, however, rulers realized that confraternities could be an instrumentum regni and firmly moved to harness their vitality to serve their own political or religious agendas.

While the articles themselves are organized into three different sections — “Frontiers,” “Churchmen and Laymen,” and “Between Politics and Devotion” — there clearly are overarching themes that provide further unity to the volume. One of these is the relationship between men and women within the confraternal movement. Giovanna Casagrande’s work on women in Umbrian confraternities, for example, points out quite clearly how women were welcomed as members, but at the same time excluded from the administration of the sodality (3–30). Anna Esposito’s article focuses on Roman confraternities exclusively for women; their purpose was clearly to “protect” women because they were seen as the weakest and most fragile members of society (447–58). Another unifying theme is the multiplicity of relationships that confraternity members enjoyed and were part of an intricate network of connections between individuals, families, corporations, and governing bodies. Lastly, the ever-present civic religion of the early modern European world is clearly at work in most, if not all, the articles in this collection.

In its variety of perspectives and wealth of information, not to mention in its stimulating interpretations of the dynamics of early modern associative drives, this rich collection of articles offers readers from all disciplines a new and thought-provoking look at Renaissance social and religious networks.