Lay Confraternities

The chapter deals with the subject of medieval confraternities, a type of associative experience common to all human civilisations, both secular and religious. The subject of the contribution is the confraternities of medieval Italy. The phenomenon is studied under the following aspects: terminology and definition of the phenomenon; legal profile and legislation; local variants and circulation of models; community memory; continuity and discontinuity, parallelism and contiguity; boundaries of solidarity and spaces of sharing; private activities and public functions between protection and control; the legacy of medieval growth.