Fixing the Black Box? the Maintenance of Confessional Booths As Infrastructural Repair in 18th Century Italy.

In the 19^th and 20^th centuries, the confessional booth—a wooden box that (usually) hosts a confessor and a layperson, providing a Goffmanian backstage for the verbal confession of sins that leads to Sacramental Absolution—has become a cultural icon of the ritual itself (Reeves & Stoneman, 2024). In popular culture, the confessional booth has come to signify the private and often secret character of face-to-face interaction while offering a privileged site for social critique (for the inappropriate conduct of priests). However, this cultural object has escaped empirical scrutiny and theoretical conceptualization except for some early modern historians’ work (De Boer, 1991). By combining concepts borrowed from historical sociology on disciplinary revolutions (Gorski, 2003) and Science and Technology Studies (Bowker & Star, 2000; Henke & Sims, 2020; Denis & Pontille, 2023), in this paper, I argue how the activities of surveillance and maintenance of confessional booths in 18^th century Verona, Italy, configure instances of infrastructural repair. By using archival data and primary sources such as the reports of pastoral visitations (during which bishops inspected confessionals, commanding their reparation), petitions via which parish priests asked permission to change them (as they were part of parish churches and they couldn’t intervene on them as they wished), and anonymous denounces made by laypeople who wanted to signal to bishops the inappropriateness of confessional booths, I show how the material character of disciplinary infrastructures (Gorski, 2003) and their physical decay proves to be decisive in organizing surveillance practices and creating the interactional circumstances in which classifications can be constructed, selves can be performed, and discourses can be mobilized.