This article focuses on the activities of confraternities in San Giovanni in Persiceto—a small town in the contado of Bologna—in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It considers their role in the spiritual lives of the brothers and their place in local religious culture. It examines relations between the confraternity and the larger church. Its argument is that the confraternities played an integrative role in what was an often divided community, but that this role was made possible by relations with “lords superior” outside the community—lords superior who intervened to enforce devotional unity.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Sneider, M. T., (2025), "Sacred Territory, Sacred Brotherhood: Confraternities in the Bolognese Contado", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Confraternitas

Original publication: Sneider, Matthew Thomas. “Sacred Territory, Sacred Brotherhood: Confraternities in the Bolognese Contado.” Confraternitas 21 (1): 2010. 3-22. DOI: . This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Confraternitas. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Confraternitas under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.