Early Modern Confraternities in Europe and the Americas: International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The contributions to this volume derive from the Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, held in Toronto in March 2003; on that occasion, scholars reflected upon ‘Recent Trends in Confraternity Studies’ in a plenary session, while papers were offered to illustrate specific advances in research. The present collection therefore reflects the renewed activity in the field of medieval and early modern confraternities, an interest in which panels at such international conferences have testified increasingly over the last three decades. The reader may, however, feel somewhat puzzled by the title, which announces a volume restricted to the early modern era, whereas some contributions actually reach back far into the middle ages; because they are not included in the title, sections on medieval confraternities may appear extraneous to the ensemble of the collection, and this despite their intrinsic value. As Christopher Black explains in his introductory chapter, the geographical span of the volume is representative of current confraternal studies, with an emphasis on Italy in six out of the fourteen remaining chapters. Yet the prominence of Italian states does not detract from geographical diversity, with case-studies concerned with Ireland, Flanders, the Low Countries or France; South American confraternities are represented in two papers on Potosí and Ecuador respectively, while the last contribution opens up perspectives into the Far East. The sub-title highlights the interdisciplinary perspective of this volume, with chapters on art history which tie well with the rest and cast a light upon the social and spiritual changes affecting confraternities as patrons and users of visual art, either in pictorial or architectural form. Yet, since all contributions appear firmly rooted within the sphere of history, the term ‘interdisciplinary’, though fashionable, may not be best suited to describe the true originality of this collection, which resides in its presenting widely different historical approaches through both narrowly-centred case-studies and broader overviews—thereby ranging from the very specific to the more general. This bold variety of approaches is both informative and revealing, although it inevitably presents some difficulties; thus, if most case-studies use extensive new research to document their specific area while at the same time opening up challenging new implications for scholars in their field, some of the shorter ones may appear too brief and limited in their conclusions, especially when compared with broader articles which engage in critical analysis and more general themes. Thus, Susan Verdi Webster's analysis of confraternities as patrons of architecture in Quito, Ecuador, manages both to draw a very precise and conceptualised picture of her case-study and to offer new paths for investigation in the wider field of colonial architecture in South America. The same could be said of Pamela Gravestock's captivating presentation of confraternities assisting condemned prisoners before death, which engages with the crucial themes of ars moriendi and imitatio Christi in pre-Reformation Italy, or of Andrea Vianello's analysis of confraternal home relief in Venice. Yet, on the other hand, Paul Trio's presentation on lay and clerical power in Flemish medieval confraternities, if interesting in itself, appears comparatively more narrative and self-contained. Whereas Dylan Reid's chapter on the Rouen confraternity of the Immaculate Conception makes edifying use of the context of the French wars of religion, Black's erudite case-study of Venetian confraternities under suspicion is more difficult to contextualise and lacks a clear argumentative line. Emma Sordo's very informative case-study of Our Lady of Copacabana in Potosí is likewise more descriptive than critical.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".