Religious Connectivity in Urban Communities (1400–1550): Reading, Worshipping, and Connecting through the Continuum of Sacred and Secular ed. by Suzan Folkerts (review)

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• Religious Connectivity in Urban Communities (1400–1550): Reading, Worshipping, and Connecting through the Continuum of Sacred and Secular ed. by Suzan Folkerts
• Nicholas D. Brodie

Folkerts, Suzan, ed., Religious Connectivity in Urban Communities (1400–1550): Reading, Worshipping, and Connecting through the Continuum of Sacred and Secular (New Communities of Interpretation, 1), Turnhout, Brepols, 2021; hardback; pp. 285; 2 b/w, 12 colour illustrations, 5 b/w tables; R.R.P. €80.00; ISBN 9782503590813.

By exploring the phenomena of religious connectivity and faith networks and addressing methodological issues concerned with their discernment, this worthwhile volume offers interesting insights into the role of religion in past societies.

Focusing on lay religious communities in Italy, Marina Gazzini opens the volume with a chapter that reveals the uniformity of confraternity statutes. This phenomenon, she argues, is strongly suggestive of intertextual modelling, including the reasonable possibility of clerical input in statute drafting, which in turn helps clarify the more individualistic features of individual communities. She encourages the viewing of confraternities as outward-facing entities, which should be seen as connected with wider social and political movements rather than just as a discrete ‘pious’ or ‘religious’ social expression. Cora Zwart’s chapter complements this, focusing on religious connectivity through a case study of the political career and religious actions of the sometime Mayor of Utrecht, Dirck Borre van Amerongen. Zwart draws attention to van Amerongen’s own annotations in personal manuscripts, material interactions with a parish through acts of foundation and donation, and his self-representation through a portrait, ultimately highlighting how religion provided a means of connectivity that transcended political circumstances and moments. A third chapter addressing lay religious communities is Megan Edwards Alvarez’s study of the Fleshers of Perth, providing a window into an urban Scottish community’s actions and sense of religious self through which economic activity is framed as necessarily also religious, breaking down the secular versus religious analytical frames so popular in the past century.

The notion of religion as a binding element of culture is brought out in Johanneke Uphoff’s study of book donations, a phenomenon that serves as a useful historical ‘indicator of the participation of the laity in religious culture and as evidence for the shared devotional culture between lay and religious professionals in the late medieval Low Countries’ (p. 99). Because such books preserve evidence of lay possession, they also point to the popularity of lay ownership of religious texts, show how family bonds and relationships worked to transcend formalised lay and religious divides within the wider community, and highlight the important role of lay religiosity in helping form religious communities’ libraries, thereby illustrating the importance of lay creative activity in the religious landscape and affirming the significance for historians of studying the materiality of books themselves as well as the ideas within them. Complementing this is An-Katrien Hanselaer’s case study of female tertiaries in Hasselt, which discerns signs of lay originality and self-direction and highlights that while a community might largely [End Page 225] rely on external religious texts, they nonetheless ‘entered into dialogue with other textual traditions’ (p. 144) through the selection and preservation of certain texts.

The following chapters focus on cultural outputs. Studying melodies in Dutch songs, Cécile de Morrée suggests that religious song collections perhaps reflect the ‘urban song culture to a greater degree than has hitherto been acknowledged’ (p. 159). While suggesting that this does not necessarily mean that religious tunes are secular in origin, de Morrée nonetheless holds out the possibility ‘that the traces of profane song that are present in religious song collections are the footprint of the late medieval sonic city’ (p. 179). In another tantalising use of sources to unpack culture, Delphine Mercuzot examines the relationship between William Caxton and printed indulgences. Arguing that ‘the printing and subsequent disappearance of indulgences illustrate the vivid religious life of fifteenth-century England, the need for tangible connectivity, and the eventual appropriation of religious printed objects by the laity’ (p. 189), Mercuzot challenges some still popular notions about the nature, reception, and use of late medieval indulgences. Unsettling straightforwardly economic readings of the phenomenon, Mercuzot delivers a more religiously...