ABSTRACT
Individuals had associations with and loyalties to family and kin; they might have them with an elite social group disassociating itself from other sectors of society, though this is less clear-cut in Italy than in some other European areas where nobility was more clearly defined. Between these groupings and belonging to a village or city, other groupings and partial loyalties existed. Particularly in cities, physical area groupings such as districts and parishes subdivided the large environment. Areas were dominated by an elite family with patronage networking below. Institutional organisations such as guilds, confraternities, universities, colleges and religious houses could variously group people. This chapter will selectively illustrate some such groupings, showing the loyalties and tensions involved. An obvious subdivision and grouping would seem to be the parish; this, however, has many complexities and variations within Italy in the first part of our period, but becomes more standard and significant under Catholic reform policies, and will be discussed separately in Chapter 10. In the earlier period other neighbourhood organisations were sometimes more important, and will be discussed below. The creation of the ghettos for Jews is an extreme form of zonal and loyalty control within some cities, and merits specific attention. We have encountered the guilds as economic organisations, but they could have wider significance, overlapping with the lay confraternities which may have grouped, for religious and non-religious purposes, up to a third of the population, rural as well as urban.
