Benevento, una città tra regno e papato: il ruolo delle confraternite nelle dinamiche istituzionali cittadine

The emergence of confraternities in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Benevento is an indication of an urge towards an arrangement of society in collective structures. In this period, the city’s secular clergy had the initiative in shaping confraternal associations as institutions of mutual spiritual and material assistance. New concepts about poverty, charity and devotion permeated medieval urban societies in the late Middle Ages. In Benevento, as in many other centres in southern Italy, this religious fervour was channelled to institutions of collective piety and charity such as hospitals and orphanages, which were at times elevated, as in the case of the Annunziata, to vehicles of civic self-organisation. It further seems that in the fourteenth and fifteenth century lay piety was vigorous enough to detach itself from the confraternities of the secular clergy and create separate entities. We believe that the systematic study of the period’s private deeds will help to better understand these late medieval institutions