Beyond Florence: The Contours of Medieval and Early Modern Italy - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804739358 ISBN 13: 9780804739351

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2002

Synopsis

For many years English-language scholarship on late medieval and early modern Italy was largely dominated by work on Florence―as a city, culture, and economic and political entity. During the past few decades, however, scholarship has moved well beyond the “Florentine model” to explore the diversity of Italian urban and provincial life―the “many Italies” that stretched from the Apennines to the Mediterranean. This volume brings together a group of sixteen urban, social, religious, and economic historians of late medieval and early modern Italy whose work reflects this shift, and illustrates some of the significant new research directions of the field.

At the volume’s core are questions important to all historians of late medieval and early modern Europe: What does the new work on Italy beyond Florence have to say about the traditional definition of the Renaissance, a definition that made Florence its paradigmatic expression? What new questions about the period in general have emerged as a result of decentering the Renaissance? How has the effort to view Florence in a wider set of Italian and Mediterranean political and economic networks shed new light on the history of city states? And how has this work led to a reexamination of the continuities connecting the late medieval world to the early modern period?

In exploring the contours of Italy from the eleventh through the seventeenth centuries, the volume creates a landscape against which to evaluate the current state of Florentine studies, the resurgence of Venetian studies, the renewed interest in Italy under Spanish rule, and the development of many other regional and local histories that are increasingly used by scholars to facilitate a broader understanding of Italy as a whole.

About this title

About the Author

Paula Findlen is Professor of History at Stanford University. She is the author of Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy. Michelle M. Fontaine is Associate Professor of History at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock. Duane J. Osheim is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He is the author, most recently, of A Tuscan Monastery and Its Social World.

From the Back Cover

“The quality of the individual essays is extraordinarily high, representative of the very best work being done in this field. The volume provides a model for the comparative study of Italian culture.”—James Hankins, Harvard University

For many years English-language scholarship on late medieval and early modern Italy was largely dominated by work on Florence—as a city, culture, and economic and political entity. During the past few decades, however, scholarship has moved well beyond the “Florentine model” to explore the diversity of Italian urban and provincial life—the “many Italies” that stretched from the Apennines to the Mediterranean. This volume brings together a group of sixteen urban, social, religious, and economic historians of late medieval and early modern Italy whose work reflects this shift, and illustrates some of the significant new research directions of the field.
At the volume’s core are questions important to all historians of late medieval and early modern Europe: What does the new work on Italy beyond Florence have to say about the traditional definition of the Renaissance, a definition that made Florence its paradigmatic expression? What new questions about the period in general have emerged as a result of decentering the Renaissance? How has the effort to view Florence in a wider set of Italian and Mediterranean political and economic networks shed new light on the history of city states? And how has this work led to a reexamination of the continuities connecting the late medieval world to the early modern period?
In exploring the contours of Italy from the eleventh through the seventeenth centuries, the volume creates a landscape against which to evaluate the current state of Florentine studies, the resurgence of Venetian studies, the renewed interest in Italy under Spanish rule, and the development of many other regional and local histories that are increasingly used by scholars to facilitate a broader understanding of Italy as a whole.

From the Inside Flap

For many years English-language scholarship on late medieval and early modern Italy was largely dominated by work on Florence as a city, culture, and economic and political entity. During the past few decades, however, scholarship has moved well beyond the Florentine model to explore the diversity of Italian urban and provincial life the many Italies that stretched from the Apennines to the Mediterranean. This volume brings together a group of sixteen urban, social, religious, and economic historians of late medieval and early modern Italy whose work reflects this shift, and illustrates some of the significant new research directions of the field.
At the volume s core are questions important to all historians of late medieval and early modern Europe: What does the new work on Italy beyond Florence have to say about the traditional definition of the Renaissance, a definition that made Florence its paradigmatic expression? What new questions about the period in general have emerged as a result of decentering the Renaissance? How has the effort to view Florence in a wider set of Italian and Mediterranean political and economic networks shed new light on the history of city states? And how has this work led to a reexamination of the continuities connecting the late medieval world to the early modern period?
In exploring the contours of Italy from the eleventh through the seventeenth centuries, the volume creates a landscape against which to evaluate the current state of Florentine studies, the resurgence of Venetian studies, the renewed interest in Italy under Spanish rule, and the development of many other regional and local histories that are increasingly used by scholars to facilitate a broader understanding of Italy as a whole.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Beyond Florence

The Contours of Medieval and Early Modern Italy

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2003 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-3935-1

Contents

Maps and Figures................................................................................................................................viiAcknowledgments.................................................................................................................................ixAbout the Contributors..........................................................................................................................xiPreface.........................................................................................................................................xvPART ONE. FLORENCE, ITALY, AND THE RENAISSANCE..................................................................................................11 Florence Redux Gene Brucker..................................................................................................................52 In and Out of Florence Paula Findlen.........................................................................................................13PART TWO. CITY AND COUNTRYSIDE..................................................................................................................293 The Other Florence Within Florence Samuel K. Cohn, Jr........................................................................................334 A World of Its Own: Economy, Society, and Religious Life in the Tuscan Mugello at the Time of Dante George Dameron...........................455 The Country Parish at Late Medieval Lucca Duane J. Osheim....................................................................................596 "Do Not Say That This Is a Man from Assisi" Robert Brentano..................................................................................72PART THREE. LAW AND SOCIETY.....................................................................................................................817 Concubines, Lovers, Prostitutes: Infamy and Female Identity in Medieval Bologna Carol Lansing................................................858 Lost Faith: A Roman Prosecutor Reflects on Notaries' Crimes Laurie Nussdorfer................................................................101PART FOUR. URBAN AND RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES.......................................................................................................1159 Pilgrim-Tourism in Late Medieval Venice Robert C. Davis......................................................................................11910 The Hermit Returns: Sanctity and the City in the March of Ancona Robert L. Cooper...........................................................13311 In the Shop of the Lord: Bernardino of Siena and Popular Devotion Cynthia L. Polecritti.....................................................14712 "Angels of Peace": The Social Drama of the Jesuit Mission in Early Modern Southern Italy Jennifer D. Selwyn.................................160PART FIVE. TOPOGRAPHIES OF POWER................................................................................................................17713 Topographies of Power in the Urban Centers of Medieval Italy: Communes, Bishops, and Public Authority Maureen C. Miller.....................18114 In Search of the Quiet City: Civic Identity and Papal State Building in Fourteenth-Century Orvieto David Foote..............................19015 Back to the Future: Remaking the Commune in Ducal Modena Michelle M. Fontaine...............................................................20516 The Spanish Foundations of Late Renaissance and Baroque Rome Thomas Dandelet................................................................219AFTERWORD Where Is Beyond Florence? Randolph Starn.............................................................................................233Notes...........................................................................................................................................243Bibliography....................................................................................................................................283Index...........................................................................................................................................315

Chapter One

Florence Redux

Gene Brucker

When, in November 1952, I made my first tremulous entrance into the reading room of the Florentine Archivio di Stato, I joined a small coterie of researchers that, on any given day, numbered no more than a dozen. The group included two distinguished historians from the United States, Felix Gilbert and Raymond De Roover, and Nicolai Rubinstein from London. The only Italian scholar in daily attendance in the archives was Elio Conti, then in the early stages of his research on fifteenth-century Florentine society. The older generation of Florentine historians had either died (Davidsohn, Caggese, Barbadoro) or were no longer actively engaged in research (Salvemini, Rodolico). Few students from the University of Florence ventured into the archives; their professors (Sestan, Garin, and Cantimori) encouraged them to work instead in the Biblioteca Nazionale. Students of the eminent economic historian Armando Sapori did work in the archives, and members of the staff (Guido Pampaloni, Francesca Morandini, Roberto Abbondanza) published the results of their research in the Archivio storico italiano and in other Tuscan journals. From this very modest nucleus of scholars then working on medieval and Renaissance Florence, it would have been difficult to predict the explosive growth of the field in subsequent years. But already in the 1950s, a cluster of young historians from the Anglo-Saxon world was coming to the archives to work on their research projects: Louis Marks, Philip Jones, Lauro Martines, Marvin Becker, David Herlihy, George Holmes, Peter Partner. This was the generation that revolutionized Florentine studies.

These scholars came to Florence from varied academic backgrounds. They were not linked to any historical tradition, nor any particular ideology or methodology. The influence of German refugee scholars (Baron, Kristeller, Mommsen, Gilbert) on this generation of Americans has been exaggerated. Though my mentor at Princeton, Theodor Mommsen, did suggest my dissertation topic on fourteenth-century Florence, I was converted to the study of Florentine history by two Oxford scholars: William Deakin and Cecelia Ady. Lauro Martines visited Florence to study Renaissance painting, when I induced him to explore manuscript sources in the archives. Marvin Becker had planned to write a biography of Walter of Brienne, when he began his research in the commune's fiscal records and developed his thesis on the evolution of the Florentine territorial state. David Herlihy came to Florence by way of Pisa and Pistoia and then began his monumental study based on fifteenth-century tax records, the catasto. He found his partner in that enterprise, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, through a chance encounter with Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie. English and Australian students migrated to Florence through their apprenticeship with Nicolai Rubinstein and Philip Jones, but their choice of research topics was often dictated by their particular interests and encounters with specific archival sources. It was these encounters, often accidental, with those records that fostered the research agendas and kindled the passions of those students. For some, fiscal records provided the raw material for their investigations; for others, it was the official sources of the commune; and for still others, private records: diaries, letters, account books.

This combination of an exceptionally rich documentary record and a group of historians endowed with tenacity and imagination has produced a body of scholarship with no equal in European urban history before the French Revolution. Hans Baron's Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance is the crown jewel of this corpus, its thesis still hotly debated four decades after publication. Rubinstein has recently published the second edition of his classic work on the Florentine constitution under the Medici. "Marvin Becker's powerful hypothesis regarding the transformation of communal government into ... the 'territorial state' has continued to reverberate in works devoted to the history of the late medieval state." Books based on the catasto records by Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber and by Conti constitute the most thoroughly documented study of the demographic and economic foundations of a Renaissance society. Martines's two books on Florentine humanists and lawyers developed a sound methodology for studying professional elites in Italian cities. Richard Trexler's pioneering and controversial work on Florentine civic ritual is required reading for students of Italian urban history. Richard Goldthwaite's books and articles on the Florentine economy have established him as the heir of a grand tradition that includes Alfred Doren, Armando Sapori, Raymond De Roover, and Federico Melis. Of the large number of books devoted to family history, the monographs of F. W. Kent and Anthony Molho, and the collection of articles by Klapisch-Zuber, stand out as works of exceptional quality.

In 1983, I published a review article on Florentine historiography in which I emphasized the domination of English-speaking scholars, the relatively modest achievement of Italians, and the absence of German historians, who had been so prominent in the field in the prewar period. I noted that in the 1970s, twenty books on medieval and Renaissance Florence had been published in English; the pattern continues today. In the past decade, sixteen history books on Florence have been published by American scholars, seven by British authors, eleven by Italians, two by Australians, and one each by French and Canadian historians. There has emerged, in the past two decades, a generation of Italian historians, well versed in the literature and methodologies of current scholarship, who are making a significant contribution to Florentine historiography.

A remarkable feature of postwar Florentine historiography is the intense concentration on the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the neglect of the period before Dante. How to explain this lack of interest in the medieval centuries, in favor of the period after the Black Death? Where, among Italian medievalists, are the successors of Gaetano Salvemini, Nicola Ottokar, Gioacchino Volpe, Cinzio Violante? Why did Rubinstein-a student in Florence of the Russian medievalist Ottokar, who wrote his first book on a thirteenth-century topic-decide instead to concentrate on the fifteenth century? Why did Herlihy, whose first book was a study of thirteenth-century Pisa and who had written articles on the economy and demography of Carolingian Europe, write his next books on late medieval Pistoia and on fifteenth-century Florence? The history of medieval Florence is essentially that constructed by Robert Davidsohn a century ago.

The concentration of Florentine research on the post-Dante period can be explained primarily by the unparalleled richness of the documentation, both public and private. A prime example is the catasto, the volumes of tax reports that have survived from 1427 to 1480. These thousand-odd tomes contain information about demographic patterns, births and deaths, marriages and dowries, economic investments; and about such topics as familial relationships; the status of women, orphans, and bastards; illness and disease; and literacy. The information contained in these tax records can be supplemented by private letters and diaries (some 150 of the latter from the fifteenth century); by notarial protocols; by court records; and by the deliberations of the civic magistracies established to confront particular problems. These include records of inventories of the property of orphans; guild records furnishing information on the lives of laborers in the cloth industry; as well as data on the identities and lives of prostitutes and on males accused of homosexual acts.

But there is a downside to this massive accumulation of source material. Florentine scholars can become so absorbed in the particular niche they have carved out for themselves that they do not see the forest for the trees. In a review article published thirty years ago, Randolph Starn noted this obsession with documents, so characteristic a feature of Florentine historical scholarship. This could lead to tunnel vision, to unwillingness to look beyond the immediate object of study to search for contexts and connections, or to consider comparisons with other Italian communities. I will cite an example of how deep immersion into the archival sources transformed the scholarship of a major historian.

I first met Elio Conti in 1952, when he was embarked on an ambitious enterprise to write a comprehensive history of fifteenth-century Florentine society based primarily but not exclusively on the catasto records. Conti had been encouraged to undertake this project by Salvemini, who had returned from exile in the United States to teach at the University of Florence after the war. Conti's plan was to identify the "classes" in Florentine society, and to demonstrate how their relations transformed the economy, the political system, and the culture. But while exploring the documentary record, Conti realized he could not understand urban society without knowledge of the rural world that surrounded and nourished it. He then published three volumes on this agrarian milieu, but he never moved beyond preliminary studies to analyze Florentine urban society, a task later undertaken by Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber with the aid of the computer.

Conti and his students edited and published a range of documentary sources: notarial records and deliberations of municipal councils. His last published work before his premature death in 1988 was a study of the Florentine fisc in the fifteenth century, a work of vast erudition, but one that puzzled readers for its empiricism and failure to summarize and contextualize the argument. Conti's plan to write an histoire totale of Quattrocento Florentine society was ultimately defeated by the "many tons of paper" that he had collected in thirty-five years of research but could not organize and synthesize.

Conti's inability to integrate his material is a symptom of a serious defect in Florentine historiography: the failure to summarize and integrate recent scholarship. In his 1970 review article, Starn observed that "a serious, full-scale history of medieval and Renaissance Florence .. cannot be expected for a long time." More recently, John Najemy has described Florentine historiography as being in a state of disintegration. Reviewing five books on fifteenth-century topics, he stressed the differences in their methods, their interpretations, and their "languages," concluding that their arguments were fundamentally irreconcilable. Felix Gilbert made the same point in an essay describing the various interpretations of three books on Florentine topics, "so different the reader may wonder if the Florence one scholar writes about can possibly be the same city another scholar discusses."

Najemy is certainly correct in concluding that controversy, not consensus, reigns in Florentine historiography. Molho has been sharply critical of what he describes as the "anglophone" tradition of Florentine history, accusing its practitioners of idealizing the republican government and ignoring the pattern of class conflict and exploitation of the urban working class and the rural peasantry by the city's dominant elite. One "anglophone" historian, Humfrey Butters, has delivered a broadside against his colleagues who (he claims) have been seduced by the lure of writing "total history" and by the claims of social science to establish historical laws. Thus on the one hand are scholars who deplore the positivist character of much Florentine historiography and who urge greater attention to theory; on the other hand are those who criticize any commitment to theoretical models, whether Marxist or marxisante, or Annaliste, or Foucaultian.

In some areas of Florentine history, a rough consensus has been achieved, most notably with respect to the city's political development "from a faction-ridden and ungovernable commune to a guild republic to an oligarchic one." Also generally accepted is the tripartite structure of Florentine society: a small, wealthy elite of entrepreneurs and rentiers; a middling class of artisans and shopkeepers; and a large underclass of the poor and the destitute. Recent scholarship has focused less on class distinctions and more on the bonds (patron-client relations; neighborhood, parish, and confraternal associations) that linked together the members of this community. The city's economic development after the Black Death remains a very controversial subject, with some historians emphasizing its growth and prosperity, and others its stagnation and decline.

The character and evolution of the Florentine economy is linked to a more fundamental issue, formulated most dramatically 140 years ago by Jacob Burckhardt when he described Florence as being "the most important workshop of the Italian, and indeed of the modern European spirit." The "modernity" of Renaissance Florence-its politics, its economy, its social order, its culture-continues to divide Florentine historians. The most forceful and eloquent exponent of the "modernity" thesis is Goldthwaite, who described his most recent book as "an enlargement of Jacob Burckhardt's classic-and much debated-vision of Renaissance Italy as the birthplace of the modern world; to his formulation about the Italians' discovery of antiquity, nature, man and the individual is here added their discovery also of things." A prominent spokesman for the opposing camp is Molho, who argues that "an immersion in the Florentine culture of the fifteenth century leads one ... to an uncompromisingly nonmodern world.... It was not a bourgeois world but rather one whose values were closer, more akin, to those of a feudal, aristocratic society."

These controversies among Florentine historians over method and interpretation can be seen as evidence of the sustained vitality and dynamism of the field. Michael Rocke's book, Forbidden Friendships, is an original, pathbreaking analysis of Florence's homoerotic culture in the fifteenth century. Samuel Cohn's study of Tuscan and Umbrian wills as testimonials of shifting patterns of piety should muffle if not silence those who have criticized the failure of Florentine historians to engage in comparative analysis. Cohn's new book, Creating the Florentine State, challenges current orthodoxy on the construction of a regional state in the fifteenth century and throws new light on rebel mountaineers on Florence's northern and eastern frontiers.

So long neglected, Florence's religious history has experienced a remarkable revival in recent years. A work in progress that is notable for its scope and depth is the study of the pre-Reformation Florentine church by David Peterson, the most comprehensive analysis of an Italian regional church that has yet been written. Equally impressive for its range and its interdisciplinary character is Dale Kent's Cosimo de' Medici and the Florentine Renaissance. No other book on Florence, or indeed on any Italian Renaissance city, has used so broad a range of sources or integrated so effectively the various strands of cultural activity in the Medici era: oral, literary, visual; Christian, humanist, popolare. The occasion of the five-hundredth anniversary of the death of Lorenzo de' Medici (1992) unleashed a torrent of publications dedicated to Il Magnifico, whose career has been more fully documented and analyzed than that of any other Florentine with the possible exception of Dante. Together with the corpus of Lorenzo's correspondence and newly discovered sources, these studies will be integrated into F. W. Kent's projected two-volume biography of Lorenzo.

The insularity that once characterized Florentine historiography has been replaced by a sustained effort to integrate the city's history into a broader regional (and peninsular) context, and to develop comparative perspectives. This integration has been a central theme in the series of volumes dedicated to Tuscan ruling elites, and in a collection of articles edited by William Connell and Andrea Zorzi on Florentine Tuscany. The focus of these volumes is the structure of relationships that linked the capital city, provincial towns, and rural villages (and their inhabitants) together. Included in this conceptual framework are the economic relations between Florence and its territory; the political and social bonds between Florentine patrons and their clients and dependents in the dominion; as well as the ties binding members of guilds, confraternities, and neighborhoods.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804739358
• ISBN 13: 9780804739351
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 344
• Editor: Findlen Paula, Fontaine Michelle M., Osheim Duane J.