During the sixteenth century many Catholics yearned for an active role in lay religiosity. One avenue to achieve this was through membership in a penitential confraternity. In the first half of the sixteenth century, the pioneering penitential confraternities concentrated on the development of membership requirements and how to translate the imitatio Christi on a secular level. The organization of the second generation of Sevillian penitential confraternities coincided with the Council of Trent (1545–1563). As Church leaders met to define their faith based on an existing foundation and to justify their vocations, the same anxiety and struggles were present on the local lay level as the subsequent generation of penitential confraternities sought to uniquely define themselves through faith and attempted to control their public persona.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Eichele, R., (2025), "The Development and Self-Definition of Penitential Confraternities in Seville, Spain, 1538–1563", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Confraternitas

Original publication: Eichele, Reanne. “The Development and Self-Definition of Penitential Confraternities in Seville, Spain, 1538–1563.” Confraternitas 21 (1): 2010. 23-44. DOI: . This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Confraternitas. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Confraternitas under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.