Household credit, social relations, and devotion in the early modern economy: A case study of religious confraternities and credit relations in the Southern Netherlands

Abstract

This article explores the contingency between the membership and daily functioning of religious confraternities, and the access to and extension of informal credit by urban households. It thus seeks to answer the question whether seventeenth- and eighteenth-century religious confraternities mattered in generating the requirements for market expansion based on interpersonal credit in the local economy of a small early modern town in transition. The analysis suggests that, in so far as confraternal socialization did produce new opportunities for household credit and access to the market, these were shaped by the hierarchical, patriarchal and disciplinary structures and moral categories of post-Tridentine associations.