Research

The article reconstructs the infrastructures that organized the administration of sacramental penance in late eighteenth-century Verona. Drawing on archival sources such as registers of licensed confessors, examination reports, and reference letters, it examines the network of practices and inscriptions through which bishops, their vicars, and diocesan functionaries authorized secular priests to hear confessions, assessed their reputation, and governed their conduct. In doing so, the article appraises the potential and limitations of the analytical category of infrastructure in historical research.

While contemporary historiography has comprehensively surveyed the doctrinal and disciplinary dimensions of sacramental penance in early modern Catholicism, the material culture of confessionals has received comparatively little attention. Focusing on the administration and regulation of confessional booths in the diocese of Verona, Northeastern Italy, during the late eighteenth century, this article argues that the administration of confessionals constituted a crucial intersection between sacred materiality and ecclesiastical governance. Through close examination of synodal constitutions, reports of pastoral visitations, and episcopal correspondence concerning the relocation, renovation, and installation of confessionals, it reconstructs the composite yet hitherto understudied social and cultural networks surrounding these objects. Besides helping us to better understand the vital role of sacred materiality in the experience and practice of early modern Catholicism, the article shows how the administration of confessionals emerged as a site of negotiation among diocesan authorities, parish clergy, and lay communities, revealing how the management of religious infrastructure served as a decisive interface between local pastoral practice and the expanding bureaucratic structures of eighteenth-century Catholic governance.

Sociohistorical research suggests that religious discourses and practices have been powerful in producing disciplined lines of conduct. Typically, however, this work has only considered the long-term consequences of discursive shifts or the one-sided outcomes of disciplinary practices. In contrast, this paper shows how the creative appropriation of disciplinary devices can instigate their transfiguration into additional disciplinary tools. By examining manuals for confession published in Counter-Reformation Italy, I identify three tactics via which believers allegedly approached Sacramental Penance as an impression management tool. The authors of these cultural objects detected the diffusion of these tactics and circulated their depictions to alert confessors and stigmatize believers who enacted them. These findings suggest that the theorizing of disciplining processes has to consider how the tactical appropriation of disciplinary practices can trigger processes of refraction via which their negative representations are reified and circulated as further disciplinary tools.

Between the 16th and the 17th centuries, the production of literature on Sacramental Penance rose. Targeted to priests and penitents, manuals for confession were among the Catholic Church’s strategies to discipline its members and believers. The professional activities of penitents have been one of the dimensions on which the authors of these texts produced interpretive categories that could be used during confessions. Inspecting these sources, this chapter shows some of the research paths through which the entanglement between the ideas of labor and leisure and the religious life in the early modern Italian peninsula can be reconstructed. Having framed this literature, I show how these texts regulated work activities during the Holy days, spread representations of the sins made by professional estates, and circulated a discourse stigmatizing laziness.

By reviewing the books What is Religious Authority?, Repairing Infrastructures, and The Punishment of Pirates, in this essay I argue that they signal a shift toward the adoption of infrastructure as a “bridging concept” within the social sciences and the humanities. By examining how the books’ authors mobilize the notion of infrastructure in their explanatory strategies, I highlight the productivity of this concept for the analysis of social situations and the interpretations arising within them.

A pervasive dichotomy structures our perception of social reality: a small number of highlighted and remarkable phenomena (what we heed, the socio-cognitive spotlight) stand out against an unarticulated background (what we disregard, the socio-cognitive default). This attentional asymmetry is further consolidated by both common sense and academic thinking, since the culturally salient elements typically get more attention, while unnoticed “negative spaces” get even less. This chapter extends the scope of cultural-cognitive sociology to analyze the conceptual couple “event/infrastructure”, central in the subfield of critical event studies (CES). The seemingly inconspicuous character of infrastructures makes them what they are, in opposition to the notable perception of events - the very same dialectic central to the distinction between what is socio-culturally marked and what is socio-culturally unmarked. Moving from this theoretical stance, the chapter elaborates a typology that accounts for the intersections between events, infrastructures, and their level of markedness and semiotic weight; furthermore, it discusses empirical case studies showing how the social phenomenology of events and infrastructure, here presented, can be implemented as an analytical instrument in the toolkit of CES.