Page 157 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

Catholic Confraternities, Kinship and Social Discipline

ancient and deep-rooted confraternities helped to preserve the unity of
the community.
Wecanthereforecertainlyconfirmthatmostlocalconfraternitiesplayed
an important role, ensuring a certain degree of solidarity within the parish
and the community. Nevertheless, this dimension should not be overem-
phasized. At any particular time, not all the women and men in a parish
were members of a confraternity. And not every member of the brother-
hood whose name we can identify in the registers really played an active
role in his association. Many of them were enrolled at a very young age –
often between 10 and 14 years – probably by their parents, and it is more
than likely that many of them would prove to have been more attracted by
other social activities than by a pious confraternity.
In order to quantify the real impact of local brotherhoods, we can build
on lists of marriages drawn from parish registers: this way we are sure to
deal with women and men who had reached adult age and could be mem-
bers of local societies. In Liddes, out of 112 couples married between 1750
and 1759 only 41 men could be ascertained to be members of a confrater-
nity (36.6); 11 other men were probably members, but the identification
is not certain. Out of 112 wives, 38 were certainly members (33.9), and 7
more were probably members as well.
90 years later, in the period 1840–1849, out of 132 married men, at least
63 were ‘brothers’ (47.7); out of the wives, 77 were ascertained to be mem-
bers (58.3). These figures must be considered with a pinch of salt, because
numerous spouses came from outside the parish and we do not know their
former biographies. But even then the aforementioned numbers are signif-
icant.Membershipwithaconfraternitywasneverafate,butachoicewhich
made visible a specific position within the parish and the village. This was
far more the case for the active core of the associations, composed of the
priors and prioresses at the top and by a wide range of officers who under-
took visible tasks during the processions or with the further confraternal
activities.
But confraternities did not always have the same meaning and the same
functions. In fact, between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries
they underwent an important change, tightly connected with the political
and religious evolutions of this period. Data drawn from the confraterni-
ties’ registers suggest that, generally speaking, women became the foun-
dation of religious life from the late eighteenth century onwards, coun-
terbalancing the effect of a growing disaffection among men. Historians
have called this phenomenon a ‘feminization of religion.’ As some men be-

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