Brotherhood and Charity in Renaissance Florence: The Role of Confraternities in Maintaining Social Cohesion During Urbanization

Abstract

This research project examines religious lay organizations in Renaissance Florence and the efforts they made to curb emerging problems for Florence’s poor. It explores how their work contributed to maintaining the cultural identity and prosperity of the newly-urbanized city through a number of rituals, forms of charity or almsgiving, and acts of mercy, and how notions of brotherhood were able to facilitate the creation of a community in an area where community seemed to be fracturing. With the emergence of commercialism, the prevalence of wage labor, and rise of aristociratic class loyalties, along with external problems such as the Black Death, the city needed new ways of approaching its new issues. The paper argues that, even though confraternities wound up dying out, they played a vital role in creating social bonds and tying together failing ends of Florentine social life during its urbanization.