Bureaucrats of the Soul. The Infrastructures of Sacramental Penance in 18th-century Verona (circa 1750–1800).

Considering the administration of the Sacrament of Penance in 18th-century Verona as a case study, this dissertation explores the infrastructures that organize the distribution of interpretive power across social situations. By combining a set of archival and edited sources such as manuals for confessions, registers of licensed confessors, and the corpus of correspondence exchanged between parish priests and the functionaries of the Veronese bishopric chancery in the second half of the 18th century, the dissertation reconstructs and articulates the interpretive and disciplinary infrastructures that bishops, general vicars, and bishopric chancellors mobilized to regulate and harmonize the performances and interpretations of confessors within confessional booths. Nobody could enter the wooden booth except for the confessor and the layperson. Moreover, given the existence of the confessional seal, what was said during that interaction could not be revealed outside the spatiotemporal boundaries of the ritual. However, to ensure the salvation of souls and the creation of a homologous network of performances, the content and structure of confession had to be thoroughly scripted. By aggregating a vast array of primary sources, the dissertation demonstrates the constant efforts of the secular hierarchies in devising, circulating, controlling, and fixing a bundle of texts and practices to create a matrix that standardized the routines of agents delegated with interpretive power across situations, configuring the contacts that took place within confessional booths more as performances than backstage social situations interactions. By combining historical and cultural sociology with historiographical methods, the dissertation enters into dialogue with multiple strands of scholarly literature. From a historiographical point of view, it provides new insights into the processes of training and selection of confessors and their supervision at the diocesan level using previously disregarded sources, such as printed licenses and lists of reserved cases, reference letters, credentials of good conduct, and request to renovate confessional booths. From a sociological perspective, the dissertation qualifies some intuitions on the relationship between religious practices and the notion of ‘bureaucracy’ while specifying arguments on the disciplining effect of symbolic discourses. By taking disciplinary and interpretive infrastructures as explanatory concepts, the dissertation offers a fine-grained empirical reconstruction of the historical processes studied while developing a transposable theoretical toolkit. Starting from the discussion of the infrastructures of Sacramental Penance in late 18th century Verona, the dissertation contributes to current debates in cultural and historical sociology on the role of culture in coordination and the relationship between sign systems and the interpretive habits of agents. Moreover, by integrating notions borrowed from science and technology studies, the dissertation further develops notions such as infrastructure, inscription, and action at a distance, probing their soundness for historical and cultural sociological research.