ABSTRACT
The allusion in my title to Natalie Zemon Davis’ acclaimed essay of 1981, ‘The Sacred and the Body Social’, is manifest. Her work and that of other scholars navigating the currents of the new cultural history of the late 1970s and 1980s has given new impetus to bring to the surface the multiple and complex ways in which religious ideas, traditions and practices have shaped communities in urban contexts through time. Among other institutions and groups, religious and lay confraternities have played pivotal roles in marshalling civic religious cultures in medieval and early modern Europe. Offering devotional and social opportunities to individuals and groups, they impacted heavily on both devotional culture and social cohesion. Religious confraternities have been approached mostly from institutional, political and charitable perspectives, and as a result little attention has been given to their production of religious texts and the latter’s relationship with their function as social institutions. 1 Registers of contemporary miracle accounts attributed by pilgrims to the patron saints of a fraternity are one type of devotional writings that allows us to illuminate the nexus of the social and the devotional. A large number of miracle studies have been carried out in the previous decades, following the works of Ronald Finucane, Pierre-André Sigal and Benedicta Ward, medievalists who have contributed to establishing the importance of miracle texts for the study of religious culture in the Middle Ages as well as in other times. 2
