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Catholic Confraternities, Kinship and Social Discipline

selves – although they were certainly influenced by the clergy as well as by
the civil authorities (Schmidt 1995; Simon 1981).
Social discipline or self-regulation, then? In historiography since the
1990s we can find good arguments for and against the social discipline the-
sis (Oestreich 1969). But the question is probably not precise enough: it
suggests that communities act collectively and in solidarity, without sub-
stantial internal differences or dissent. Recent studies show, on the con-
trary, that social behaviour can vary substantially even within a small com-
munity, diverging not only from one social class to another, but also be-
tween different political, religious and even sexual milieus (Sabean 2023;
Guzzi-Heeb 2014; 2009).
In order to answer the question raised above we are going to analyse the
political and sexual behaviour among the members of several devotional
confraternities in the Swiss Alps, and more precisely in the villages of Lid-
des and Bovernier, in the Western, French-speaking part of the Canton
of Valais. This case study will be approached in a genuine micro-historical
spirit, trying to make use of different types of sources revealing – to a cer-
tain extent – the political and religious allegiances of men and partly of
women, as well as some visible aspects of their sexual lives.
This poses a major methodological problem, because it often means try-
ing to decipher how people behaved, about which the sources often do not
tell anything, or which becomes conspicuous only when comparing differ-
ent types of documents. This was partly made possible by comparing the
content of one source with that of other, often serial, documents, above
all the registers of the confraternity members, which provided essential
information if studied through the lens of network analysis. Moreover,
the study of family and kin solidarities or conflicts would not have been
possible without extensive recourse to a large genealogical database, the
Registre Historique de la Population du Valais (rhpv), which is developed
andmanaged by theCentreRégionaldeRecherches sur les Populations
Alpines (crepa) in Sembrancher, Valais.¹

Confraternities and Village Sociability
Looking at the multiple functions of confraternities in rural communities,
we have to emphasize a feature which has often been overlooked or un-

¹ The rhpv is a dynamic genealogical database (heredis software) that links individuals,
parents, spouses, godparents, best men and women, and so on. The database contains in-
formationon more than258,000 individuals, 72,000 marriages and 14,600 family names.
Genealogical information is taken mainly from parish registers.

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