In This Paper I Would Like to Analyse the Parish in Early Modern Piedmont Through the Corporate

Parish and Confraternity in Early Modern Chieri

Angelo Torre (Eastern Piedmont)

In this paper I would like to analyse the parish in early modern Piedmont through the “corporate model” which is characteristic of continental Europe, and Italy in particular, from the XIV to the late XVIII Century. Following this model, individuals and social actors create communities which are characterised by a number of rights in order to meet the specific interests of members. From a conceptual point of view, the single bodies appear to be “spaces created by way of exception in relationships to the general constitution of the territory” and territory itself is formed“not from the general but from the particular”(“non dal ‘grande’ ma dal ‘piccolo’”: Mannori 2008).

This model has the advantage of grouping a number of local institutions under the category of “collegia” (corporations) – from brotherhood to guilds, from charities to commons, and, eventually,to the university itself, thereafter composing a local “plural” space.

My proposal is to include local ecclesiastical institutions, such as the parish, in the “corporate model”: this inclusion seems to me to be able to explain the “constant interpenetration” between township and Church as well as between central power and the Church; the capacity of the parish to represent the grass-roots institutions, such as the “meeting of household heads” (Grendi); its very XVth century diffusion fits well into the inclusion of the parish into the “communal” domain (Berengo, Blickle). In the countryside, for a long time the parish has beenan ill-defined, ubiquitous, and overwhelmingly jurisdictional institution, but it was a constant object of communal politics.

The corporate nature of the parishallows also to understand why it was defined by a number of practices, by which I mean patterns of actions whose meaning was widely shared locally. As a matter of fact, we can hardly distinguish the parish from brotherhoods both from the juridical point of view and from the practices which characterised it (Mombelli Castracane). Hence the interaction of the parish with other local bodies was so conflict-ridden: it is based on what has been defined a “culture of possession” (Raggio), that is a culture which granted the primacy to the effective rather than to the formal exercise of the right to use material as well symbolical resources.

The categories of practice and possessionallow to question in new terms the Catholic Church jurisdictional drive during the second half of the XVI century: the distinction of functions, and the separation between the institution of the parish, the devotional life and the administration of the townshipcould seem charming. A case study from Chieri can illustrate them.