Download PDF | (Medieval Mediterranean 83) Shona Kelly Wray - Communities and Crisis_ Bologna During the Black Death-Brill Academic Publishers (2009).
313 Pages
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book has been a long time in coming. While I have thoroughly enjoyed talking about my findings at conferences and seminars, returning to the archives, and exploring topics spurred by new readings in the notarial records and discussions at meetings, my choices to extend the process have sorely tried the patience of editors at Brill, colleagues in my department, and my family at home. I owe to them first of all a deep debt of gratitude for their support.
Scholarship is nourished and enriched by participation in communities that sustain research and communication. I was fortunate to spend time in one such wonderful community of scholars and artists at the American Academy in Rome. I thank especially Lester Little and Michelle Mulcahey and members of the Medieval Studies discussion group at the AAR for their insightful communications. My colleagues at UMKC have formed another strong supporting community for me, of which I am lucky to have so many excellent medievalists as partners in research and teaching. Of my colleagues I thank especially Jim Falls, who read through the manuscript at an earlier stage, and Linda Voigts, who provided me with exciting opportunities early on to discuss my findings on the Black Death. The students in my undergraduate course on the Black Death and graduate students in various seminars have also been a stimulating force in my work and thinking. I also wish to thank the Miller Nichols Library staff and especially the office of InterLibrary Loan. In addition to the Rome Prize, the research for this book was supported by a University of Missouri Research Board Grant and a Faculty Research Grant.
Over the years I have been able to hone my ideas on testaments and notarial records, on women’s inheritance, and on the Black Death with many exceptional individuals at conferences and seminars in the US and overseas. I have grown and my work has benefited from their suggestions, but all errors and shortcomings remain, of course, my own. I have learned from and thank Martin Bertram, Isabelle Chabot, Sam Cohn, William Connell, George Dameron, Steven A. Epstein, Monica Green, Linda Guzzetti, Shennon Hutton, Sherri Johnston, Bill Jordan, Julius Kirshner, Glenn Kumhera, Trish Skinner, Carol Lansing, Christine Meek, Andreas Meyer, Paul Oldfield, Duane Osheim, Dan Smail, and Jutta Sperling. Sarah Blanshei read several chapters and has given me invaluable advice from her immense knowledge of the sources. Special thanks also go to Roisin Cossar and Elena Brizio who read through the entire manuscript with care. The work has also benefited from the comments of two anonymous readers for Brill.
In the Archivio di Stato of Bologna, Massimo Giansante has always been extremely generous with his great knowledge of the archives. Giorgio Tamba as director of the ASB was also very supportive of my project. Their scholarship and archival expertise have been important guides for me. The staff of the ASB make it a pleasurable place to work. At the University of Bologna, Tiziana Lazzari, Paolo Pirillo, and Rosella Rinaldi provided a forum for fruitful discussions of my research. I am privileged to have known two masters: Gianfranco Orlandelli, with whom I studied paleography, and Antonio Ivan Pini, who offered me advice when I was a graduate student mining the depths of the Memoriali. It should be obvious that the prolific writings of Antonio Ivan Pini inform large parts of this monograph. His untimely death was a loss to all students of medieval Bologna. I offer this book in dedication to his memory.
My sister, Maggi Kelly, generously gave her time and expertise to produce the maps. I dedicate this book also to her and the rest of my family.
Parts of Chapters Three, Four, and Six appeared in earlier versions and different form in the following articles: “Speculum et Exemplar: The Notaries of Bologna during the Black Death,” Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken 81 (2001): 200-227; “Women, Family, and Inheritance in Bologna during the Black Death,” in Love, Marriage, and Family Ties in the Middle Ages, eds. Miriam Muller and Isabel Davis (Belgium: Brepols, 2003), 205-215; “Boccaccio and the Doctors: Medicine and Compassion in the Face of Plague,’ Journal of Medieval History 30 (2004): 301-322; “Tracking Families and Flight in Bologna during the Black Death,” Medieval Prosopograpy: History and Collective Biography 25 (2004, published 2008): 145-160.
A NOTE ON CURRENCY, NAMES, AND TITLES
The monetary sums noted in the documents are monies of account involving the standard values of denari, soldi, and lire. Twelve denari equaled a soldo, and twenty soldi equaled a lire. The money that was coined and circulated in Bologna during 1191 to 1464 were the Bolognini, appearing as grosso or picciolo (worth one twelfth of a grosso), which are not listed in the documents or this study. Some bequests from the Bolognese testaments were indicated in values of the Venetian ducat and Florentine florin. Calculations to convert these currencies to the Bolognese soldi and denari can be done by means of Peter Spufford, A Handbook of Medieval Exchange (London, 1986), pp. 72-77.
Names have been left in the original Latin, except for those individuals who are well known, such as the law professors of the university of Bologna or religious figures. I have also used the Italianized names when referring to the elite families of Bologna. In the text and tables I have retained the Latin names through out, including use of fq for filius quondam or filia quondam. I have followed exactly the records in the spelling of names, which was not standardized: there was frequent doubling of letters (e.g., Pepolis and Peppolis, Galuciis and Galluciis); the letters h and p were often added (e.g., Blanchuciis/Blancuciis, Bonacaptis/Bonacatis, Bolognittus/Bologniptus, and in the case of the priestly title dopnus for dominus); and several letters were used interchangeably such as ch, c, and g (e.g., Panichalis/Panicalis/Panigallis), u and o (e.g., Bertulucius/Bertolucius), s and x (e.g., Basacomatribus/ Baxacomatribus), c and t (e.g., Galutiis/Galuciis). However, because notaries switched back and forth between ¢/C and z/Z (e.g., Bonzaminus or Bongaminus, Zambechariis or Cambechariis), I have for ease and simplicity in searching names used z/Z. I am loath to impose upon the notarial records a sort of standardization that was not present. The retention of the Latin spelling is not intended to confuse, but instead aid scholars in further research of this material.
Titles in late medieval Italy varied according to local usage. In fourteenth-century Bologna the use of dominus and domina was standard for married people and does not appear to have indicated any difference in social status. Thus I have omitted it and retained only those titles which did differentiate the holder from others either in terms of wealth or social prominence, such as nobilis or providus, or profession, such as magister or ser. It should be noted that, according to the written evidence in the notarial records, the notaries of Bologna did not regularly use the title ser. The priests of Bologna were distinguished by the title dopnus, which I have retained.
INTRODUCTION
... considering that during this year there was in all the world and especially in Bologna an infinite mortality the likes of which has never been seen on earth...*
From a petition for tax relief to lords of Bologna, Giovanni and Giacomo Pepoli, 20 August 1348
This book is about society under stress, about people’s actions in the face of disease. A frightening, new pestilence entered the ports of Sicily and northern Italy at the end of 1347 and spread inland in the spring of 1348. It moved throughout Europe in the following three years, killing over one third of the entire population. Italy was the first place in Europe to suffer, and the devastation was particularly heavy, with some towns losing over half of their populations. Whether the Black Death was an epidemic of bubonic plague due to the bacterium, Yersinia pestis, or of a viral hemorrhagic fever or was the result of concurrent, multiple epidemics is not the subject of this book.’ Instead, the subject is the populace of the late medieval town of Bologna. The Black Death serves as a lens to examine a social world. What is uncovered from the documents about the actions of individuals during the epidemic may also be useful to researchers of the disease, but it would be inaccurate to predict how the epidemic should have unfolded based on modern plague studies. Diseases mutate over time and, thus, the context for discussion of the experience of the Black Death cannot be bubonic plague. Instead, this study of the epidemic starts with the evidence that remains and makes no assumptions about what may or may not have happened based on the characteristics of the disease.
The social communities of late medieval urban Italy are the context for this study. During the last three decades there has been a spate of studies on the social communities and networks that shaped and informed life in medieval and Renaissance Italy. The bonds of family, work, religion, and neighborhood were interwoven through all social interactions. Much of our knowledge of the social life of the medieval populace comes from studies of Renaissance Florence and Venice.’ This book explores these themes in an earlier period, which is often harder to investigate because of the lack of appropriate sources, and in a city, which has not received adequate attention from Englishlanguage scholars despite the fame of its university and wealth of archival material. As a town of approximately 50,000 at the end of the thirteenth and perhaps 45,000 before the Black Death, Bologna is more representative than heavily-examined Florence and Venice. Its political history of turning from a communal government to a signoria before mid fourteenth century, instead of an enduring republic, also makes Bologna’s history more typical.
In contrast to the paucity of studies on medieval Bologna, the topic of the Black Death has been the subject of intense historical scrutiny.’ The debates surrounding the medieval epidemic of 1347-1349 appear unending. Despite the mountains of published material, there is a strong need for further investigation for Bologna and beyond.* This book goes beyond any previous study of the Black Death by examining the immediate experience of the epidemic. Historians of medieval Italy have relied on chroniclers and literary authors such as Giovanni Boccaccio, Agnolo di Tura del Grasso, and Gabriele de’ Mussis to understand what it must have been like to live through the unbelievably frightening experience of massive mortality brought on by an unknown, infectious disease on an epidemic scale. Chroniclers expressed their horror of the experience of plague in intensely dramatic descriptions, and the Black Death is everywhere told and retold today with their emphasis on shock, horror, and upheaval. College textbooks for Western and World history survey courses repeat medieval chroniclers’s portrayals of the epidemic, emphasizing the breakdown of normal human relations. Responding to an unabated appetite for studies of the Black Death, the popular press continues to print new books that rehash the same medieval stories adding to the mix new additions of scientific findings on modern diseases. My work does not rely on literary accounts, but presents new medieval evidence of actual behaviors during the epidemic using an under-utilized source: the testament. Micro-historical studies based on the reconstruction of families are difficult, if not impossible, for most of the medieval period, but the many testaments produced in Bologna during the months when the plague struck has allowed for such an analysis. The information found in the notarial registers of Bologna, known as the Libri Memoriali, and the testaments of the suppressed religious houses, known as the Demaniale, is unmatched. By means of the paper trail of the contract-based, notarial culture of medieval Bologna, we can construct an accurate portrait of life during the crisis.
Notarial culture was fundamental, penetrating all sectors of medieval life, and thus notarial sources provide evidence for the activities of people at all levels of society. In addition to uncovering material on historical subjects that are often lost to history such as women and members of the non-elite classes, notarial records also reveal important new information about the historical figures who have traditionally garnered the limelight. For Bologna, political historians have studied the decrees and legislation of the ruling Pepoli family, but the acts and testaments of the Memoriali at mid fourteenth century shed new light on their piety and place within the civic communities. Similarly, the professors of the Studium were famous in their day and their treatises have long been the focus of study by historians of education and the law. Their wills as discussed in this book provide information on the marriage and inheritance strategies of this powerful and prestigious intellectual class. But the clients of notaries were not simply the rich and famous. As the wills of artisanal families discussed in this book reveal, many of the commoner classes made choices that were significantly different from the elites on whom most studies have been based. Also offered in this book is new information on notaries that goes beyond the usual discussion of the notariate and notarial law. Their registers illuminate not only the ways that the notariate functioned as an institution permeating almost all aspects of governmental, commercial, and social interactions in town, but also the social role of the notary in civic life, especially in the neighborhoods. Thus this book is not merely an investigation of the immediate experience of the Black Death, it is also a demonstration of the fundamental nature of notarial culture in medieval civic life. Notarial records provide a roadmap to understand the experience of the epidemic, and plague promoted an abundance of records in a short time that allow us to chart the extent to which notarial culture informed daily life.
Most examinations of reaction to plague that reach the detailed level of this book come from the early modern period when the disease repeatedly cycled back through Europe. Historians tell the story of attitudes to plague in the early modern period in terms of the determined management of disease by professionals. The administrations of Renaissance Italian cities organized boards of health to oversee activity during recurring outbreaks. Urban health officials of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries developed ordinances with strict measures and penalties for dealing with public health during times of plague. Cities imposed quarantines on people exposed to contagion. Whole families were isolated, while the infected were removed to pesthouses. Under official direction, the bedding and belongings of victims of plague were burned, and their houses were fumigated with smoke and cleansed with vinegar. Boards of health organized burials outside the city following detailed regulations concerning the location of graves and disposal of corpses.° If they did not already have one, cities paid for communal doctors or medici condotti, who provided free services to the poor and charged wealthier patients on a sliding scale.’ Physicians wrote tract after tract on the prevention of and remedies against plague. With the invention of the printing press, these tractates were made widely available.’ And for those who were too poor to procure the more expensive ingredients, public health officials circulated recipes for the “easy medicines” recommended by board-sponsored physicians.
While much less evidence exists to study the management of the disease in 1348, what remains also supports the view that people of all social ranks sought to manage their responses to the epidemic. The well-known physicians and professors of medicine in Italy, Gentile da Foligno and Giovanni della Penna, also produced consilia against plague. They were addressed to civic officials and physicians in order that immediate action be taken to prevent and treat the disease. As Anna Campbell, Dominick Palazzotto, and Jon Arrizibalaga have demonstrated, their advice is very similar to later plague tractates.° The magistrates of some Italian cities immediately passed legislation to prevent the spread of disease. The most famous example and fullest extant civic plague ordinances of 1348 come from Pistoia.'° As will be discussed in Chapter Four, the intention of the ordinances was to keep Pistoia free from the infection that was raging in the nearby towns of Pisa and Lucca: mobility was restricted, infected clothing or bedding was burned, burials were regulated, and deaths were reported to the commune. Regulations of butchers and tanners were implemented to preserve public health by reducing miasma or corrupt air. All of these measures were in line with later plague legislation.
In other towns in Italy less evidence remains, but the same general trend to manage the disease can be found. Florence, where plague had entered earlier in March, passed similar regulations in April concerning travel and the belongings of infected persons. A commission was appointed to regulate matters of public health, and the city paid for the autopsies of bodies of several plague victims “in order to know their illness more clearly”.!' The government of Perugia asked physicians to dissect the cadavers of plague victims.’* The government of Venice passed plague legislation in 1348 that prohibited movement and regulated burials."
In Bologna, no plague legislation has remained. However, as will be demonstrated in Chapter Four, the government did not disband. The signori or lords of Bologna continued their normal executive function of receiving citizens’s petitions during the summer when plague was raging. The introductory quote is taken from one of these petitions. The voice of Bolognese citizens expressing their shock at the onset of the epidemic is almost impossible to find among the legal records. Indeed, in the testaments written during the epidemic there is no mention of plague. Nevertheless, the huge numbers of these documents are eloquent testimony to the very real and frightening presence of massive death. It is in the mundane and highly formulaic notarial records that we find the most vivid evidence for the management of life during a time of overwhelming death. This book tries to redress the imbalance in current scholarship that privileges the Renaissance actions of the social management of disease and dismisses similar previous medieval attempts.
After plague entered Bologna thousands of individuals and families were faced with the prospect of widespread illness and death. Unlike natural disasters, such as fire or earthquake, disease did give one time to put one’s affairs in order. Mothers and fathers had to arrange for the future of their children and their loved ones. The most important arrangement to make was to complete one’s testament, since this document provided for both immediate and future, temporal and spiritual concerns. Men and women, as we will see, put aside their daily tasks of commercial exchange and made their wills. Because of the sheer number of testaments that were drawn up, they are the best guide to the experience of this crisis. Through them we can see the efforts of individuals trying to deal with the effects of epidemic disease on their daily life.
Testaments are a particularly rich and complex type of historical document. At the making of a will the testator was immersed in a moment of great decision. Present, past, and future were merged as the testator assessed his or her current personal financial situation and decided how best to fulfill hopes and concerns for the memorialization of the soul and the future of the family. The testator had to look ahead and prepare for the passage of his or her soul, while also recalling the past events of his or her life and the people that had filled it. This moment represented the confluence of many circumstances and relationships, of both spiritual and secular concerns.’* Debts could be settled, marriages provided for, the material comfort of one’s spouse and children secured, business and neighborhood ties recognized and rewarded. At the same time, the testator prepared for the life of the soul after death. As Jacques Chiffoleau aptly pointed out, the making of a will marked an act of continuity, of concern for the perpetuation of the family in the future and the journey of the soul to the next life.’
This work tracks the social experience of the Black Death through the evidence of notarial acts and testaments from two years: the year of the epidemic of 1348 and a comparative year, 1337, when Bologna was relatively free of disease, famine, or major war. From the normal year there remain in the Memoriali 315 copies of testaments redacted in the city, whereas for the plague year are preserved 1147 last wills and codicils that were copied into the Memoriali registers and a further 85 original parchment wills that were deposited in the Franciscan and Dominican houses and can be found today in the papers of the suppressed religious houses, the Demaniale.'* Although the numbers may justify it, this book does not offer a statistical analysis of the testaments. Such an analysis is apt to disregard the richly complicated nature of the testament. As Martin Bertram has emphasized, despite its strongly formulaic aspect, a testament is “by its nature an individual and complex document whose contents cannot be as easily schematized as those of leases or tax rolls.”'’ Conclusions are not based on statistical tests, but rather the qualitative analysis of a large number of data. The analysis begins with the particulars, the bits of information revealed in the wills, that are inserted as tessarae in a mosaic which, it is hoped, presents a nuanced and detailed picture of late medieval urban life. Or, to use another analogy, much as an archeologist has to piece together a building from small fragments, this book uses the historical sources as the guide to understanding social life. The assemblage of the narrative is not without consideration of a realistic structure to the building or a composition for the patterns of the mosaic. In other words, the information gathered is not considered to have been randomly produced nor should it be arbitrarily organized and analyzed. The core is provided by the studies of social interactions of Renaissance Italian cities mentioned above: the importance of “family, friends, and neighbors” is recognized as paradigm of urban life, which was affected by gender and class. However, none of these concepts is utilized independently of the data. The categories of analysis and conclusions of this book are intimately linked, in other words, grounded, in the data.’*
Fortunately, the data is abundant, at least from a medievalist’s viewpoint. The Memoriali are a gold mine of information, revealing the actions and aspirations of thousands of individual Bolognese from the rich and famous, the educated and the landed, to artisans and even some of the lowest paid wage earners. The legal parameters surrounding the testament and its preservation through the Office of the Memoriali or the mendicant sacristies of Bologna constructed evidence that allows us to lead a detective-like investigation of life during the epidemic. Each will is an excellent window to view a gathering of about a dozen people, brought together for reasons of piety, charity, kinship, and social and legal norms. Each piece of information has value and each is referenced in the hope that others may be able to use this study as a finding guide for their own interests.’’ It is the assumption of this work that to understand how people and communities behaved during this time of unprecedented crisis, we must follow their actions, not any preconceived notions of how we thought they might have behaved.
Chapter One explores the consumer side of notarial culture, setting out the social and gendered profile of late medieval testators. It also explains the intricacies of medieval Bologna’s most famous source, the Libri Memoriali, as well as the accompanying series of the Provvisori and the alternative deposit for testaments, the Demaniale. Instituted during Bologna’s golden era in the late thirteenth century, the Memoriali underwent important institutional changes in the mid fourteenth century. This book is the only major study of the Memoriali after the introduction of the Provvisori, and the first chapter can serve as guide to those doing research on this time period. The results of a detailed analysis of how the source functioned during the epidemic reveals that, although it entered into crisis, the office continued to work and was not abandoned. Chapter Two uses information from the wills to build a picture of life in Bologna during one of its darkest periods, which has seen little scholarly attention. While prosperous and growing thirteenth-century Bologna continues to be an object of study, there is a need for work on the fourteenth century, because new institutional and political structures, such as the signoria, developed at that time. Similarly, although the university was past its peak, the early to mid fourteenth century was the age of the famous legists, such as Giovanni d’ Andrea and Jacopo Bottrigari, both of whom show up in the testaments as do their family members. This second chapter finds that many of the political, intellectual, and economic centers of Bologna’s thirteenth-century “golden age” endured with continued vitality into the fourteenth century. It also presents a social and economic profile of fourteenth-century Bologna that delineates wealth and economic activity by quarters, parishes, and zones circumscribed by the city walls.
In the third chapter we turn to the people and how they experienced the epidemic of plague. The popular image of the Black Death today is that family members abandoned each other, and people streamed out of the city gates in order to escape the disease. Certainly the medieval chroniclers encourage us to think this way, and perhaps it makes sense for many, because that is how we assume people would have behaved when faced with such a disaster. The evidence that remains suggests otherwise. There was no massive flight, no extensive family abandonment. Chapter Four closely examines the behavior of professionals such as doctors, notaries, priests, friars, and the ministrali or parish leaders during the epidemic to arrive at similar conclusions of stability and resilience in the face of disaster. Chapter Five studies the community of neighborhood by tracing the activity of witnesses in wills redacted during the months of plague.
The bonds of neighborhood are revealed through the actions of individuals. The final layer of community investigated is the family, the subject of Chapter Six. The focus is on inheritance, that is, strategies for the continuation of the family. Much of the scholarly discussion of late medieval inheritance has been based on laws of intestacy that dictated rigid, patrilineal rules for the transfer of property. However, when we examine the actual wills, we find that people were more flexible in their choices and that the patterns set out in intestacy law were not always followed in the actual transmission of property set out by testaments. The narrative of this book, thus, moves from the source and the city to the people who produced them both, populating and preserving these historical forms as monuments to the amazing resilience of medieval society.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق