Guido Alfani has produced an informative, even if ultimately unsatisfying, work on the religious sociology of early modern Italy. Based on research he began during his doctoral dissertation project, the book was originally published under the title Padri, padrini, patroni: la parentela spirituale nella storia (Venice: Marsilio, 2007). In Fathers and Godfathers, Alfani argues that the reforms of the Council of Trent (1545–1563) forever changed the character and quality of longstanding religio-social relationships known as godparenthood and spiritual kinship. He utilizes quantitative analysis of baptismal records extracted systematically from diocesan, city, cathedral, parish, and monastic archives in select portions of northern Italy. The English edition of this work, translated by Christine Calvert, appears in a series edited by Thomas Mayer, one designed to trace continuities between medieval and early modern European societies usually presented in discontinuous terms. Many readers will wonder initially how the principal thesis Alfani presents helps along the trajectory envisioned for the series. There is, however, powerful reason to include the book in this series, and to consider it a substantial contribution to the religious history of early modern Italy.
In the introduction and first three chapters, Alfani provides an overview of godparent practice in the history of Christianity, up to the Council of Trent. The practice emerged only when infant baptism became widespread, as an outgrowth of the sponsores employed in adult baptism. Godparents answered the baptismal questions put to infant candidates. The relationship of child and godparent created barriers that could not be crossed, and the sixth-century Justinian Code banned marriages between godfathers and goddaughters. Any such union among spiritual kin was considered incestuous. Abuses later emerged, as for instance the practice of some women acting as godmothers to their own children in order to effect separation from undesirable spouses. When adding the wide variety in practice concerning the number of godparents any infant might have—and Alfani amply details that variety on numerous maps and charts—the stage was set for Martin Luther's outrage over the practices, especially over the dispensations for spiritual consanguinity that generated vast curial income. More controversy swirled, Alfani suggests, because of differing intentions among reformers—Protestant and Catholic—who saw a flourishing practice they wished to change.
Alfani then shows that the practice of godparenthood underwent significant change due to Tridentine conciliar legislation. Wrangling on the matter during the Bolognese phase of the council (1547) exposed the firm commitment of significant numbers to both the multiple and restricted godparent models. A compromise proposal found some support but failed, as social and economic—not theological—realities drove the lengthy debate. There was no resolution until the final sessions at Trent (1563) when the matter was considered of far less significance than matrimony and the need to eliminate clandestine marriages. So, prelates at the council insisted that godparents could be two, at most, and must be both morally worthy and well suited to carrying out the role of tutor in Christian education to the baptized child. They left no room for maneuvering, Alfani tells his readers, as they were engaged in a form of “social engineering” (89). But what follows the overview of Trent are meaty chapters on one element or another of the resistance and compromise obvious in the data Alfani has carefully mined from many local archives. When the old models of godparenthood in Europe were made illegal by the Tridentine rules, local populations adjusted. Some did so rapidly, and others over a longer period of time. Still others actively resisted. In northern Italy, in areas dominated by the paragon Tridentine reformer Carlo Borromeo and his associates, baptismal records show that the one godfather/one godmother model gradually took hold. While the council may have intended to undermine the traditional social, civic, and economic functions of godparenthood generally, in the case of foundlings, Tridentine legislation may actually have enhanced it. And after conducting prosopographic analysis of the comparative standings of parents and godparents, Alfani concludes that godparent choices continued to reflect patron/client relationships, despite the opposition to such choices expressed at the council.
Alfani finds, in essence, two rather different things. He finds that conciliar legislation was applied in northern Italy in a manner that reduced the acceptable models of godparenthood to one: that of a single godfather/godmother couple. The process of adaptation was slow, but in communities he studied, it was largely complete thirty or forty years after the conclusion of Trent. He also found that the legislation from that same council failed overall, despite reduction in the number of godparents in northern Italy. Even there, verticalization of the godparent/parent relationship occurred, and not what council fathers had in mind: a relationship among relative equals, as in marriage. That verticalization undermined the Christian educational goal implied in the Tridentine vision of godparenthood. In Europe outside of northern Italy, of course, implementation of conciliar legislation was even more hotly contested.
Readers might have found this book more persuasive if Alfani had argued directly for recognition of the complexity he located in practices both before and after Trent. In the tenth and final chapter he rightly describes the Tridentine legislation as a plan for reform that not even a saint could fully implement. Characterizations of the Church as an institution that “only . . . [after] the Council of Trent . . . was able to impose its own wishes universally” (204), or of the Tridentine assembly as “established by the Catholic Church to stem the tide of Protestantism” (209), are thus all the more puzzling. And trying to decipher Alfani's central conclusion is not helped by the abrupt ending of the text on page 232 in mid-sentence, either. That is more than a typo. Still, this book adds dramatically to our knowledge of a fascinating religious practice in early modern Italy, and it contains substantial evidence supporting the need to find continuity between medieval and early modern Italy.
