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Religion, kinship and godparenthood as elements of social cohesion in Qrendi, a late-eighteenth-century Maltese parish

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 May 2010

FRANS CIAPPARA
FRANS CIAPPARA
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Malta.
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Abstract

This micro-study examines the Maltese parish of St Mary's (Qrendi) in the second half of the eighteenth century. First it will be argued that – as in many other contemporaneous communities – migration to other parishes made its population extremely fluid. A second interest lies in the extent to which social distinctions and unruly behaviour further disrupted village solidarity. Finally there will be a consideration of the thesis that such unstable elements were counterbalanced by various integrative ties that bound the Qrendin together, such as charity, the obligations of neighbourliness and an intense devotion to the parish, kinship and godparenthood.

Religion, parenté et parrainage: autant d'éléments de cohésion sociale à qrendi, une paroisse de l'île de malte, fin du 18e siècle

On observe d'abord, dans cette paroisse de Ste Marie de Qrendi, à la fin du 18e siècle, comme dans nombre d'autres communautés de l'époque, que les migrations de paroisse à paroisse ont rendu la population extrêmement fluide. Un second aspect digne d'intérêt est une augmentation de la rupture des solidarités villageoises due à des différenciations sociales et à des comportements hors normes. Enfin nous prenons en considération l'idée selon laquelle, contre de tels facteurs d'instabilité, jouaient différents éléments de cohésion sociale favorisant l'intégration dans la communauté locale, tels que charité, obligations de voisinage, intense dévotion à la paroisse, à la parenté et aux rapports de parrainage.

Religion, verwandtschaft und patenschaft als elemente des sozialen zusammenhalts in qrendi, einer gemeinde auf malta, im 18. jahrhundert

Diese Mikrostudie untersucht die Gemeinde der Heiligen Maria in Qrendi in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts. Zunächst wird darauf verwiesen, dass die Bevölkerung – wie in vielen anderen Gemeinden zur selben Zeit – durch Wanderung in andere Gemeinden in ständiger Bewegung war. Als nächstes geht es um die Frage, inwiefern die Dorfgemeinschaft durch soziale Abgrenzungen und widerspenstiges Verhalten zusätzlich zersetzt wurde. Schließlich wird die These erörtert, dass solche unstabilen Elemente durch verschiedene integrative Bande wie z.B. karitative Einrichtungen, die Verpflichtungen der Nachbarschaft und eine intensive Hingabe an Gemeinde, Verwandtschaft und Patenschaft, die allesamt zum Zusammenhalt Qrendin beitrugen, aufgewogen wurden.

Type
Research Article
Information
Continuity and Change , Volume 25 , Special Issue 1: SPECIAL ISSUE ON KINSHIP IN BRITAIN AND BEYOND FROM THE EARLY MODERN TO THE PRESENT , May 2010 , pp. 161 - 184
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

ENDNOTES

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9 Synodus Dioecesana ab Illustriss. et Reverendiss. Domino Fratre Davide Cocco Palmerio Episcopus Melitensi, 1703 (Malta, 1842), 116.

10 PA (Qrendi), Lif. Def. ii, fos. 55r, 61v.

11 Ibid., fo. 48v.

12 For Malta, F. Ciappara, Marriage in Malta in the late eighteenth century (Malta, 1988), 15–18; for Italy, A. Bellettini, ‘Gli Status Animarum: caratteristiche e problemi di utilizzazione nelle ricerche di demografia storica ’, in Comitato Italiano per lo Studio della Demografia Storica, Le fonti della demografia storica in Italia vol. 1, part I (Rome, 1972), 3–42. Peter Laslett lamented that ‘no document headed Liber Status Animarum has yet come to light in England, but in this, as in much else to do with numerical recordings, we seem to have been unfortunate’; see his Family life and illicit love, 54.

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17 AAM, Conti (Qrendi), 16–18.

18 Constant, G., ‘Une source négligée de l'histoire ecclésiastique locale: les registres anciens de marguilliers. Étude d'un de ces registres du XVI siècle’, Revue d'Histoire Ecclésiastique 34 (1938), 504–41Google Scholar; Goujard, Philippe, ‘Les fonds de fabriques paroissiales: une source d'histoire religieuse méconnue’, Revue d'Histoire de l'Église de France 68 (1982), 99–110CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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21 PA (Qrendi), Lib. Def. ii, fos. 48v, 54v.

22 Ibid., fos. 50v, 57r, 58v, 62v, 85v.

23 See Paul Cassar, Medical history of Malta (London, 1964).

24 Carmel Testa, The French in Malta, 1798–1800 (Malta, 1997).

25 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world in the Age of Philip II, vol. 1 (London, 1972), 150.

26 Peter Earle, Corsairs of Malta and Barbary (London, 1970). Fontenay, Michel, ‘Corsaires de la foi ou rentiers du sol? Les chevaliers de Malte dans le ‘‘corso’' méditerranéen au XVIIe siècle', Revue d'Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 35 (1988), 361–84Google Scholar; Salvatore Bono, Corsari nel Mediterraneo: cristiani e musulmani fra guerra, schiavitù e commercio (Milan, 1993).

27 A. Blondy, ‘L'Ordre de Saint-Jean et l'essor économique de Malte 1530–1798’, in C. Villain-Gandossi ed., Le carrefour Maltais (Aix-en-Provence, 1994), 78–81; Michel Fontenay, ‘Le développement urbain du port de Malte du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle’, ibid., 99–103.

28 Frans Ciappara, Society and the Inquisition in early modern Malta (Malta, 2001), 53–5.

29 Braudel, The Mediterranean, 158.

30 Carmel Vassallo, Corsairing to commerce: Maltese merchants in XVIII century Spain (Valletta, 1997).

31 A. Blondy, ‘La France et Malte au XVIIIe siècle: le problème de la double nationalité’, in Stanley Fiorini and Victor Mallia-Milanes eds., Malta, a case study in international cross-currents (Malta, 1991), 174–86.

32 Ciappara, Society and the Inquisition, 46–53.

33 AIM, Proc. 135B, fo. 832v.

34 CEM, AO 779, fos. 50r–v.

35 AIM, Proc. 133C, fos. 926r–927v.

36 Ciappara, Marriage in Malta, 92–5.

37 CEM, AO 782, fo. 141r–v.

38 PA (Qrendi), Lib. Def. ii, fo. 77r.

39 Ibid., fos. 72v, 73v.

40 David Sven Reher, Town and country in pre-industrial Spain: Cuenca, 1550–1870 (Cambridge, 1990), 299.

41 NAV, ‘Ruolo della galeotta nominata il Santissimo Crocefisso, San Nicola e le Anime Sante del Purgatorio, 1777’, 5.

42 AIM, Proc. 124A, fo. 290r.

43 AIM, Proc. 92A, fo. 59r.

44 See, among other examples, AIM, Proc. 134A, fo. 450r.

45 AIM, AC 567, fo. 215v.

46 AIM, AC 565, fos. 113r–114v.

47 AIM, Registrum Actorum Civilium C7 (1782–87), fos. 227r–228r.

48 Ciappara, Frans, ‘Intercessory funerary rites in Malta, 1750–1797’, Nuova Rivista Storica XCI (2007), 163Google Scholar.

49 PA (Mdina), Lib. Def. iv, fos. 19r, 437r.

50 A marriage legacy (a kind of dowry) is a sum of money bequeathed by a testator to help poor girls marry. Often the testator stipulated that the couple should marry in his own parish or, perhaps, in the cathedral in Mdina.

51 For the opposite case in Nottinghamshire see Anne Mitson, ‘The significance of kinship networks in the seventeenth century: south-west Nottinghamshire’, in Charles Phythian-Adams ed., Societies, cultures and kinship, 1580–1850: cultural provinces and English local history (London, 1993), 56–62.

52 On this topic for present-day Malta see the comments of Jeremy Boissevain in Hal-Farrug. a village in Malta (New York, 1969), 36–40.

53 PA (Qrendi), Lib. Bapt. III, fo. 114v.

54 CEM, AO 781, fo. 186r.

55 F. Braudel, Capitalism and material life, 1400–1800, vol. 1 (London, 1973), 380–1. See also Colin Pooley and Jean Turnbull, Migration and mobility in Britain since the 18th century (London, 1998), 93–46.

56 Joseph Aquilina, A comparative dictionary of Maltese proverbs (Valletta, 1972), 198, no. 82.

57 Collomp, A., ‘Alliance et filiation en haute Provence au XVIIIe siècle’, Annales: É.S.C. 3 (1977), 445–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 AAM, SA 23A, no. 84 (1779), fos. 1r–2v.

59 Edward Muir, ‘The idea of community in Renaissance Italy’, Renaissance Quarterly 55, 1 (Spring, 2002), 3–6. Thanks to Beat Kümin for suggesting this reference.

60 For enmity as a cause for not receiving the Lord's Supper in Lutheran villages see B. Tolley, Pastors and parishioners in Württemberg during the late Reformation 1581–1621 (Stanford, California, 1995), 78–9.

61 John A. McHugh and Charles J. Callan eds., The catechism of the Council of Trent (Rockford, Illinois, 1982), 445–7.

62 J. Bossy, Peace in the Post-Reformation (Cambridge, 1998) and Christianity and the West 1400–1700 (Oxford, 1985), 57–75. See also Eamon Duffy, The stripping of the altars: traditional religion in England 1400–1580 (London, 1992), 91–5.

63 AAM, SA 4A, no. 17 (1702), fo. 12r.

64 CEM, AO 672, fos. 364r–377v; National Archives Mdina, Magna Curia Capitanale, Libro dei Carcerati 1774–1779, fo. 162r.

65 Ibid., fo. 30r.

66 AIM, AC 568, fos. 130r–133v.

67 AIM, AC 567, fos. 210r–211v.

68 AIM, AC 570 (i), fos. 244r–245v.

69 On this topic see Wrightson, ‘The “decline of neighbourliness” revisited’, 19–49.

70 Aquilina, A comparative dictionary of Maltese proverbs, 219, no. 14; 229, no. 83.

71 For the situation in England see Muldrew, Craig, ‘“Hard food for Midas”: cash and its social value in early modern England’, Past and Present 170 (2001), 83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

72 NAV, Not. Michel'Angelo Farrugia, 6/817, fo. 220v, 22 July 1773. On the topic that debt was more of a kind of financial aid than a formal financial transaction see K. Wrightson and D. Levine, Poverty and piety in an English village: Terling 1525–1700 (New York, 1979), 100–1.

73 AAM, Conti (Qrendi) 17A, no. 24, 44.

74 For example, NAV, Not. Gio. Francesco Farrugia, 20/816, fo. 54r, 8 Nov. 1748.

75 NAV, Not. Michel'Angelo Farrugia, 2/817, fo. 24r, 18 Nov. 1768.

76 PA (Qrendi), no. 9, fo. 164r; NAV, Not. Fabritio Bigeni, R 59/6, fos. 58v–60v, 24 Sept. 1656. For another example of distribution of bread to the poor see NAV, Not. Gio. Francesco Farrugia, 21/816, fo. 11v, 9 Sept. 1749.

77 AAM, Conti (Qrendi) 16, nos. 15, 75.

78 Ibid., 17A, nos. 18, 49.

79 NAV, Not. Tommaso Magri, 11/924, fos. 27r–28r, 19 Nov. 1742.

80 For village solidarity and prejudice against outsiders see D. E. Vassberg, The village and the outside world in golden age Castille: mobility and migration in everyday rural life (Cambridge, 1996), esp. ch. 2.

81 Michael Kenny, A Spanish tapestry: town and country in Castille (Gloucester, Massachusetts, 1969), 9.

82 For regional variation see P. Burke, Popular culture in early modern Europe (London, 1978), 50–2.

83 For non-attendance at church in eighteenth-century Lancashire owing to ‘want of proper apparel’, see M. F. Snape, The Church of England in industrialising society: the Lancashire parish of Whalley in the 18th century (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2003), 25.

84 AAM, Rivelationes 1700–1715, unpaginated.

85 Synodus Dioecesana, 1703, 54.

86 AIM, Proc. 135B, fos. 602r–603v.

87 Anthony Bezzina, ‘Id-dfin fil-knisja parrokkjali’ (‘Burial in the parish church’), Socjetà Muzikali Lourdes Qrendi A.D. 1895 (pamphlet issued for the Festa of Our Lady of Lourdes, 119).

88 Confraternities were lay organizations whose members met to pray together but also they ensured that after their death members would have a number of masses said for their soul. In 1783 these were the confraternities of the Holy Sacrament, the Rosary and Our Lady of Consolation – AAM, Pastoral Visitations 40, fo. 161r.

89 AAM, RS 12, fo. 481r.

90 AAM, RS 9, fo. 1017r–v.

91 Michelle M. Fontaine, ‘A house divided: the Compagnia de Santa Maria dei Battuti in Modena on the eve of Catholic reform’, in John Patrick Donnelly and Michael W. Maher eds., Confraternities and Catholic reform in Italy, France and Spain (Kirksville, Missouri, 1999), 55.

92 Ciappara, Frans, ‘The parish community in eighteenth-century Malta’, The Catholic Historical Review 94, no. 4 (2008), 671–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

93 AAM, Conti (Qrendi) 18, nos. 20, 31.

94 Ibid., 17, nos. 15, 42.

95 Ibid., nos. 16, 64.

96 Ibid., 18, no. 9, 33.

97 Ibid., no. 13, 16.

98 Ibid., no. 15, 22.

99 For a forceful exposition of this theme see Jeremy Boissevain, Saints and fireworks: religion and politics in rural Malta (New York, 1965).

100 Peter Laslett, The world we have lost (London, 1971), 62.

101 AIM, Proc. 86B, fo. 386r.

102 AIM, Proc. 78B, fo. 598v.

103 Aquilina, A comparative dictionary of Maltese proverbs, 191, no. 20.

104 PA (Qrendi), Lib. Bapt. iii, fo. 138r.

105 See, for instance, Ibid., fos. 137v, 141r.

106 C. Klapisch-Zuber, ‘The name “remade”: the transmission of given names in Florence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries’, in Women, family and ritual in Renaissance Florence (Chicago, 1985), 290.

107 J. Davis, People of the Mediterranean: an essay in comparative social anthropology (London, 1977), 167. It also corroborates David Cressey's findings for England that ‘there was more vigour and potency to English kinship than is generally credited’ (Cressey, David, ‘Kinship and kin interaction in early modern England’, Past and Present 113 (1986), 38–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar). It differs, however, from what Alan Macfarlane found in the northern upland English parish of Kirkby Lonsdale in Cumbria on the edge of the Yorkshire moors and from the lack of interest in kin exhibited by the seventeenth-century Essex clergyman Ralph Josselin; see A. Macfarlane, The origins of English individualism: the family, property and social transition (Oxford, 1978), 75–6, and The family life of Ralph Josselin, a seventeenth-century clergyman: an essay in historical anthropology (New York, 1977), chs. 7 to 10.

108 The classic work on the subject is Peter Laslett ed., Household and family in past time (Cambridge, 1972).

109 For the hypothesis that in traditional society there was no substantial move toward a conjugal family system, see William J. Goode, World revolution and family patterns (New York, 1963), 17.

110 CEM, SA 16, no. 9.

111 NAV, Not. Tomaso Magri, 4/924, fo. 26v, 16 Nov. 1728.

112 AAM, SA 23A, no. 84, fo. 3v.

113 NAV, Not. Pietro Paolo Magri, 6/922, fo. 81r–v.

114 PA (Qrendi), Lib. Def. iii, fo. 74v. PA (Mqabba), Lib. Def. iv, fo. 43.

115 On this point see Ciappara, ‘Una messa in perpetuum’, 289.

116 NAV, Not. Tommaso Magri, 4/924, fos. 89v–90r.

117 For the theoretical problems raised by this term see Julian Pitt-Rivers, ‘The kith and the kin’, in Jack Goody ed., The character of kinship (Cambridge, 1973), 89–105. For its application in one country consult Julian Pitt-Rivers, ‘Spiritual kinship in Andalusia’, in his The fate of Shechem or the politics of sex: essays in the anthropology of the Mediterranean (Cambridge, 1977), 48–70.

118 S. W. Mintz and E. R. Wolf, ‘An analysis of ritual co-parenthood’, Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 6 (1950), 341–67.

119 J. A. Bossy, ‘Godparenthood; the fortunes of a social institution in early modern Christianity’, in K. von Greyerz ed., Religion and society in early modern Europe 1500–1800 (London, 1984), 197.

120 Barbara A. Hanawalt, The ties that bound: peasant families in medieval England (Oxford, 1989), 247; Will Coster, Baptism and spiritual kinship in early modern England (Aldershot, 2002), 140; Louis Haas, ‘Il mio buono compare: choosing godparents and the uses of baptismal kinship in Renaissance Florence’, Journal of Social History 29, 2 (1995), 341–56; Klapisch-Zuber, Women, family, and ritual in Renaissance Italy, 287.

121 Fine, Agnès, ‘L'héritage du nom de baptême’, Annales: É.S.C. 42, 4 (1987), 860CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

122 A. G. Martimort ed., The church at prayer, vol. 3: The sacraments (Collegeville, Minnesota, 1987), 90.

123 McHugh and Callan, The catechism of the Council of Trent, 175–6.

124 National Library, Malta, Library 14, p. 216 (1 Jan. 1764).

125 For the adaptation of godparenthood to ‘political’ ends see Julian Pitt-Rivers, ‘Ritual kinship in the Mediterranean: Spain and the Balkans’, in J. G. Peristiany ed., Mediterranean family structures (Cambridge, 1976), 317–34.

126 E. Friedl, Vasilika: a village in modern Greece (New York, 1963), 72.

127 PA (Qrendi), Lib. Bapt. iii, fos. 77v, 81r.

128 For one such desolate village see Gérard Bouchard, Le village immobile: Sennely-en-Sologne au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1972).