2 - Homosociality and civic (dis)order in late medieval Italian confraternities

Summary

Civic and spiritual peace were goals explicitly sought by the people of late medieval urban Italy, yet in spite of enormous efforts by secular and ecclesiastical authorities alike, and the expenditure of enormous amounts of creative energy on the establishment of new political structures and new laws, and the proscription of old forms of vendetta-provoking behavior, peace continued to elude its pursuers during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This essay examines some of the roles late medieval confraternities played in promoting peace in Italian cities, as they co-operated with communal authorities in their mutual concern for civic order; it also reveals that precisely in the kinds of co-operation they maintained with structures of communal power confraternities ultimately posed as much of a challenge to peace as they did a guarantee of its promotion. This ambivalent relationship between confraternal and communal peacemaking reflected similar tensions between other public groups, all of them ultimately grounded in the inevitable strains of a fundamentally homosocial society.

In 1216, an anonymous Florentine chronicler tells us, a dispute arose, initially between two men, but ultimately between two family factions. The original parties to the dispute were Oddo Arrighi and Buondelmonte de' Buondelmonti, and their initial disagreement arose over a point of dinner-table etiquette on the occasion of the knighting of a member of a third family, the Mazzinghi. Peace between the two original antagonists was initially sought, and it was agreed that Buondelmonte should marry a niece of Oddo Arrighi, a daughter of the Amidei family.