Reviewed by:

• Religious Connectivity in Urban Communities (1400–1550): Reading, Worshipping, and Connecting through the Continuum of Sacred and Secular ed. by Suzan Folkerts
• Nicholas D. Brodie

By exploring the phenomena of religious connectivity and faith networks and addressing methodological issues concerned with their discernment, this worthwhile volume offers interesting insights into the role of religion in past societies.

Focusing on lay religious communities in Italy, Marina Gazzini opens the volume with a chapter that reveals the uniformity of confraternity statutes. This phenomenon, she argues, is strongly suggestive of intertextual modelling, including the reasonable possibility of clerical input in statute drafting, which in turn helps clarify the more individualistic features of individual communities. She encourages the viewing of confraternities as outward-facing entities, which should be seen as connected with wider social and political movements rather than just as a discrete ‘pious’ or ‘religious’ social expression. Cora Zwart’s chapter complements this, focusing on religious connectivity through a case study of the political career and religious actions of the sometime Mayor of Utrecht, Dirck Borre van Amerongen. Zwart draws attention to van Amerongen’s own annotations in personal manuscripts, material interactions with a parish through acts of foundation and donation, and his self-representation through a portrait, ultimately highlighting how religion provided a means of connectivity that transcended political circumstances and moments. A third chapter addressing lay religious communities is Megan Edwards Alvarez’s study of the Fleshers of Perth, providing a window into an urban Scottish community’s actions and sense of religious self through which economic activity is framed as necessarily also religious, breaking down the secular versus religious analytical frames so popular in the past century.

The notion of religion as a binding element of culture is brought out in Johanneke Uphoff’s study of book donations, a phenomenon that serves as a useful historical ‘indicator of the participation of the laity in religious culture and as evidence for the shared devotional culture between lay and religious professionals in the late medieval Low Countries’ (p. 99). Because such books preserve evidence of lay possession, they also point to the popularity of lay ownership of religious texts, show how family bonds and relationships worked to transcend formalised lay and religious divides within the wider community, and highlight the important role of lay religiosity in helping form religious communities’ libraries, thereby illustrating the importance of lay creative activity in the religious landscape and affirming the significance for historians of studying the materiality of books themselves as well as the ideas within them. Complementing this is An-Katrien Hanselaer’s case study of female tertiaries in Hasselt, which discerns signs of lay originality and self-direction and highlights that while a community might largely [End Page 225] rely on external religious texts, they nonetheless ‘entered into dialogue with other textual traditions’ (p. 144) through the selection and preservation of certain texts.

The following chapters focus on cultural outputs. Studying melodies in Dutch songs, Cécile de Morrée suggests that religious song collections perhaps reflect the ‘urban song culture to a greater degree than has hitherto been acknowledged’ (p. 159). While suggesting that this does not necessarily mean that religious tunes are secular in origin, de Morrée nonetheless holds out the possibility ‘that the traces of profane song that are present in religious song collections are the footprint of the late medieval sonic city’ (p. 179). In another tantalising use of sources to unpack culture, Delphine Mercuzot examines the relationship between William Caxton and printed indulgences. Arguing that ‘the printing and subsequent disappearance of indulgences illustrate the vivid religious life of fifteenth-century England, the need for tangible connectivity, and the eventual appropriation of religious printed objects by the laity’ (p. 189), Mercuzot challenges some still popular notions about the nature, reception, and use of late medieval indulgences. Unsettling straightforwardly economic readings of the phenomenon, Mercuzot delivers a more religiously...

审阅者：

• 城市社区的宗教连通性（1400-1550）：阅读、崇拜以及通过神圣与世俗的连续体进行联系 编。作者：苏珊·福尔克茨
• 尼古拉斯·D·布罗迪

通过探索宗教连通性和信仰网络的现象，并解决与其辨别有关的方法论问题，这本有价值的书为宗教在过去社会中的作用提供了有趣的见解。

玛丽娜·加齐尼 (Marina Gazzini) 重点关注意大利的平信徒宗教团体，她在本书的开头一章揭示了兄弟会章程的统一性。她认为，这种现象强烈暗示了互文模型，包括在法规起草中文书输入的合理可能性，这反过来又有助于澄清各个社区更个人主义的特征。她鼓励将兄弟会视为面向外的实体，应将其视为与更广泛的社会和政治运动相关，而不仅仅是一种离散的“虔诚”或“宗教”社会表达。科拉·兹瓦特 (Cora Zwart) 的章节对此进行了补充，通过对前乌得勒支市长迪尔克·博雷·范·阿梅隆根 (Dirck Borre van Amerongen) 的政治生涯和宗教活动的案例研究，重点关注宗教连通性。兹瓦特提请人们注意范·阿梅隆根在个人手稿中的注释、通过基金会和捐赠行为与教区的物质互动，以及他通过肖像的自我表现，最终强调了宗教如何提供了一种超越政治环境和时刻的联系方式。第三章涉及非宗教团体，梅根·爱德华兹·阿尔瓦雷斯 (Megan Edwards Alvarez) 对珀斯的 Fleshers 进行的研究，为了解苏格兰城市社区的行为和宗教自我意识提供了一个窗口，通过该窗口，经济活动必然也被视为宗教活动，打破了世俗与宗教的分析框架在上个世纪如此流行。

约翰内克·乌福夫 (Johanneke Uphoff) 对图书捐赠的研究提出了宗教作为文化的约束性元素的概念，这种现象可以作为平信徒参与宗教文化的有用历史指标，并作为宗教文化的证据。中世纪晚期低地国家的世俗和宗教专业人士之间共享的虔诚文化”（第 99 页）。由于此类书籍保留了平信徒拥有的证据，因此它们还指出了平信徒拥有宗教文本的普遍性，展示了家庭纽带和关系如何超越更广泛社区内正式的平信徒和宗教分歧，并强调了平信徒宗教信仰在宗教信仰中的重要作用。帮助建立宗教团体的图书馆，从而说明了宗教领域中世俗创造性活动的重要性，并肯定了历史学家研究书籍本身的物质性以及其中的思想的重要性。 An-Katrien Hanselaer 对哈瑟尔特女性高等教育机构的案例研究对此进行了补充，该研究发现了外行原创性和自我导向的迹象，并强调虽然社区可能在很大程度上[End Page 225]依赖外部宗教文本，但他们仍然通过选择和保存某些文本“与其他文本传统进行对话”（第144页）。

以下章节重点关注文化产出。塞西尔·德·莫雷（Cécile de Morrée）研究荷兰歌曲中的旋律后认为，宗教歌曲集也许反映了“比迄今为止公认的更大程度的城市歌曲文化”（第 159 页）。尽管德莫雷认为这并不一定意味着宗教曲调的起源是世俗的，但他仍然提出了一种可能性，“宗教歌曲集中存在的亵渎歌曲的痕迹是中世纪晚期声音城市的足迹”（第 17 页）。 179）。德尔菲娜·默库佐（Delphine Mercuzot）在另一个令人着迷的利用资源来解开文化的过程中，探讨了威廉·卡克斯顿（William Caxton）与印刷版赎罪券之间的关系。梅尔库佐认为“赎罪券的印刷和随后的消失说明了 15 世纪英格兰生动的宗教生活、对有形连通性的需求，以及宗教印刷品最终被俗人挪用”（第 189 页），梅尔库佐对一些仍然流行的观点提出了挑战。关于中世纪晚期赎罪券的性质、接受和使用的概念。梅尔库佐对这一现象的直截了当的经济解读令人不安，他提供了一种更加虔诚的……