Women in the Brotherhood: Gender, Class, and Politics in Renaissance Bolognese Confraternities
Year: 2009
Type: article
Abstract: TERPSTRA M..ona Lucia Bolza and her spiritual sisters had a bone to pick with the men of Bologna.For decades women had been progressively shut out of worshipping in lay confraternities.Now, in 1547, they made a stand.A group of perhaps thirty gathered at the shrine of S. Maria della Pietà on the eastern wall of the city before the men of the shrine's confraternity met for evening prayers.With Mona Lucia doing the talking, they demanded, first of God and then of the confraternity officials and men, permission to join in the gatherings under the mantle of the Virgin Mary.The women wanted to congregate in the shrine to the service, honour, and glory of God, and they wanted to be subject to all that the confraternal statutes and oath required of the men.The men received all of this in their hearts and, in a secret vote, unanimously approved the women's demands.The women then asked the men to give them a head and guide-so long as it was not one of their husbands.In prayer, and by the will of God, they elected and confirmed Mona Lucia as Prioress for the coming year.This Authorized Version of the sisters' successful assault on a bastion of male privilege occurs in the prologue to the statutes drawn up for the women of S. Maria della Pietà in the following year.^Thetriumphal tone does not quite obscure the signs of advanced planning evident in the ritualized assault, nor can it obscure the result that becomes clearer in the statutes themselves.The women did not join the men under the mantle of Mary, under the statutes and oath, or, for that matter, in the shrine.-^Theirconsorority was separated from, but administered by, the men's confraternity; their devotional exercises excluded the offices and flagellation characteristic of the men's devotion; and they were not given any reason to meet in the shrine's oratory.Even their statutes appear to have been written in part by the men.^Why then was the ritual confrontation staged, and why was the women's defeat portrayed as a Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme, XXVI, 3 (1990) 193
Source: Renaissance and Reformation
Author: Nicholas Terpstra
Language: English
Topic: Early Modern Women Writers
Subfield: Religious studies
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2603217871