Membership lists Trinity confraternity "Confrérie de la Trinité" Lyon 1306 and 1422

Membership lists to the Trinity confraternity in Lyon, 1306 and 1422.  Published as annexes to "Canons, Councillors and Confrères: Changing Power Constellations in the City of Lyon (Late Middle Ages, Early Modern Times)" 

Author: Susanne Rau

Membership lists of the years 1306 and 1422 relating to a general confraternity (French: confrérie générale) in the city of Lyon: the Trinity Confraternity (confrérie de la Trinité), founded in Saint-Nizier in 1300. The 1306 membership list (annex 1) is an excerpt from the book of the Trinity confraternity, Le livre des confrères, which since the 19th century is held in the Municipal Library of Lyon as part of the Coste collection (Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon, Ms Coste 355: Registre de la confrérie de la Sainte-Trinité de Lyon, 1306–1792). The 1422 membership list is part of the same source, the livre de confrères.

The membership lists are included as annexes 1 and 2 to the research article by Susanne Rau "Canons, Councillors and Confrères: Changing Power Constellations in the City of Lyon (Late Middle Ages, Early Modern Times)", published in Religion and Urbanity Online (de Gryuter).

Article Summary:

Integrated into the Kingdom of France only around 1300, Lyon is a typical example of a city where diverse and potentially conflicting power resources reigned for a long time and influenced urban life in different ways. Lyon, therefore, can be taken as a typical case of urban heterarchy. The paper describes these power structures and the potential influence of urban and ecclesiastical institutions: the archbishop with a cathedral chapter (St. John), monasteries and convents (the mendicant orders), the consulate (with its main church St. Nizier and the chapel St. Jacquême as their seat) as well as the confraternities (secular associations). This synchronic picture alone shows two things: First, the Church in Lyon was not at all unified but was composed of different actors with different roles and responsibilities. Secular power did not belong only to the consulate but also to the confraternities and, later, to the royal officers. Second, there were fixed powers as well as interactions between religious and political structures and changes in power. For example, ecclesiastical and secular jurisdiction belonged to the archbishop for a long time, from whom it passed to the city's royal officers after 1550. The confraternities, especially that of the Trinity, occupied the intermediate position between the church and the laity. Or, in other words, with the advent of this great general confraternity, we can observe the assumption of responsibility for religious (and charitable) affairs by the laity. As a third point, I will show how the constellation of power and its evolution are reflected in the urban space by territorial demarcations, by the implantation or takeover of symbolic buildings, and by processions organised by ecclesiastical actors and local authorities.

Revised paper of the conference ‘Urban Heterarchies: Changing Religious Authority and Social Power in Cities’ (Erfurt, December 11–13, 2019), funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) and organised by the Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies “Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations” at the Max Weber Centre, University of Erfurt. Research conducted in Lyon was also funded by the DFG – FOR 2779. Special thanks go to Simone Wagner (for a first read), to Jean-Louis Gaulin (for his comments and valuable hints) and to Corentin Durand (for his research on the members of the confraternity during the summer of 2020, at a time when I was not allowed to travel to Lyon due to the Corona pandemic).