Seven Hundred Years of Fraternal Orders

Abstract

For hundreds of years there has been an allure in popular culture to the notion of a band of brothers. From before Shakespeare's Henry V, through Schiller's Wilhelm Tell, to the twenty-first century TV mini-series Band of Brothers, the phrase has evoked images of men fiercely loyal to one another, united for a cause greater than themselves. This interest has not been reflected in concerted scholarly attention to the long-term influence of fraternal organizations. This chapter introduces the theme of the volume in a literature review and contextualizes the authors' contributions.The aim of this volume is to conceptualize fraternal organizations and to emphasize the significance of their roles in both transforming and being changed by European societies over many centuries. It explores the significance of the links between rituals, secrecy, hierarchy and the maintenance of gendered roles over a period of several hundred years enabling new comparisons to be made and wider social mores to be reconfigured. No single associational form can encompass British friendly societies, French fraternal bodies, Lerwick's 'Vikings' and Flemish 'parrot' shooters. However, if we classify them as siblings, the similar aspects of their responses to common threats and comparable opportunities emerge in a new light. There are studies of such bodies as the convent-based Youth Confraternity of the Purification of the Virgin (which had an important economic role and spread ideas about the importance of public, political and religious duties), the confraternities of early modern Florence and Bologna (which prepared abandoned children for civic life and family roles), the German regional student fraternities, Landsmannschaften (with their duelling ritual and rules about the order of meetings and the colours to be worn on armbands and sashes) and the fraternal associations which helped men to form communities in nineteenth-century America. 1 In