Download PDF | Paula Findlen, Michelle Fontaine, Duane Osheim - Beyond Florence_ The Contours of Medieval and Early Modern Italy- (2002).
345 Pages
About the Contributors
Robert Brentano is professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. His major publications include Two Churches: England and Italy in the Thirteenth Century (1968), Rome Before Avignon (1991), and A New World in a Small Place: Church and Religion in the Diocese of Rieti, 1188–1378 (1994). Gene Brucker, Shepard Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of many books on Renaissance Florence, among them Florentine Politics and Society, 1343–1370 (1962), The Civic World of Renaissance Florence (1977), and Renaissance Florence (1983).
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., is professor of medieval history at the University of Glasgow and the author of seven books. The most recent are Creating the Florentine State: Peasants and Rebellion, 1348–1434 (1999) and The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in Early Renaissance Europe (2002). Robert L. Cooper is completing his dissertation at the University of California, Davis. Among his research interests are the religious and urban history of late medieval Italy. His chapter in this collection springs from his dissertation.
George Dameron is professor of history and coordinator of the Humanities Program at Saint Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont. The author of Episcopal Power and Florentine Society, 1000–1320 (1991), he has also published on a variety of topics related to medieval Italy, such as rural communes and north Italian magnates. Thomas Dandelet, assistant professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, works on the western Mediterranean world in the early modern period with a special emphasis on Italy, the Spanish Empire, and their connections. Among his publications is Spanish Rome, 1500–1700 (2001). He is presently at work on a history of the Colonna family.
Robert C. Davis is associate professor of history at Ohio State University, where he teaches and writes on Renaissance and early modern Italian history. His current interest in the story of tourism in Venice stems from his years of work in that city, together with his mixed sense of stunned revulsion and grudging admiration at what the mass-tourist industry has been able to do with the Most Romantic City in the World. Out of this has come Venice, Tourist Maze: A Cultural Critique of the World’s Most Touristed City.
Paula Findlen is professor of history at Stanford University and director of the Science, Technology, and Society Program. Her publications include Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (1994); Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe (2001, with Pamela H. Smith); and The Italian Renaissance: Essential Readings (2002). Michelle M. Fontaine is associate professor of history at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Her interest in Italian urban history stems from her work for her master’s degree with William M. Bowsky. Her research on the urban and religious culture of early modern Modena has resulted in a number of articles.
David Foote is assistant professor of history at Mississippi State University. Among his research interests is the Italian church in the age of communal formation. He is the author of several articles and has recently completed a book manuscript, Lordship, Reform, and the Development of Civil Society in Medieval Italy: The Bishopric of Orvieto, 1100–1250. Carol Lansing is professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of The Florentine Magnates (1991), Power and Purity: Cathar Heresy in Medieval Italy (1998), and a forthcoming study of medieval ideas about politics and the expression of grief, The Lament for the Dead: Gender and the Vita Civile in Communal Italy.
Maureen C. Miller is associate professor of history at George Mason University. Her book The Bishop’s Palace: Architecture and Authority in Medieval Italy (2000) won the 2001 Marraro Prize of the Society for Italian Historical Studies. Currently she is preparing a documentary history of the Gregorian Reform and writing a brief urban history of Florence. Laurie Nussdorfer, professor of history and letters at Wesleyan University, is the author of Civic Politics in the Rome of Urban VIII (1992) and essays on urban space, print culture, and artisan guilds in early modern Rome. She is currently at work on a book about the history of writing practices that focuses on Roman notarial documents.
Duane J. Osheim, professor of history at the University of Virginia, is the author of A Medieval Monastery and Its Social World and An Italian Lordship: The Bishopric of Lucca in the Middle Ages. He received his Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Davis, where he studied under William M. Bowsky. Cynthia L. Polecritti is associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author of Preaching Peace in Renaissance Italy: Bernardino of Siena and His Audience (2000). She is currently working on a book about street life in nineteenth- and twentiethcentury Italy. Jennifer D. Selwyn, assistant professor of history at the University of New Hampshire, is the author of several articles on the Jesuits in southern Italy. She is completing a book manuscript titled A Paradise Inhabited by Devils: The Jesuits’ Civilizing Mission in Early Modern Naples. Randolph Starn is professor of history and Italian studies and currently director of the Italian Studies Center and Program at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent book is a collection of his essays, Varieties of Cultural History (2002).
Preface
Beyond Florence: The Contours of Medieval and Early Modern Italy emerged from a conference held at Stanford University in November 1998 to celebrate the career and accomplishments of William M. Bowsky, well known among historians of medieval and early Renaissance Italy for his work on the social, political, and economic history of the medieval commune of Siena, and more recently for his work on the religious history of Florence.
This conference brought together several generations of scholars of Italian urban, religious, and social history—many of them former students and colleagues of Bill Bowsky—for a lively discussion of the current state of the field. We spent three memorable days returning to some of the classic problems of Italian history, debating the use of sources, examining each other’s case studies, and discussing the reasons periodic conversation among medievalists and early modernists sharpens our perception of both fields. We chose the theme “Beyond Florence” for several reasons that become apparent throughout this volume. In the past two decades, the study of Italy among Anglo-American historians has broadened considerably from an intense focus on the Florentine Renaissance to a much more diffuse exploration of Italy’s geography.
The chapters in this volume reflect the results of this research. Although acknowledging that the field, in its entirety, has never focused exclusively on Florence—nor for that matter is it ignoring Florence now, since there is currently a considerable renewal of Florentine scholarship—we are nonetheless convinced that historical research today on premodern Italy is much more reflective than it was some fifteen years ago of the complexity and variety of social and political arrangements in the Italian peninsula, much more willing to look at the small city and contado in conjunction with the well-known city-states.
At the same time, our conversations have made us well aware of how much our methodological approaches to those regions beyond Florence have been shaped by the powerful imprint of Florentine historiography. Florence is almost always a crucial point of reference in any study of Italy that attempts comparative analysis. We might simply say that historical scholarship on Florence reached a state of maturity before work done on virtually any other city-state, or even on other parts of Tuscany. The confluence of popular fascination with Florence as a city of living history, abundant manuscripts for virtually every imaginable kind of history, and successive generations of historians trained to cut their teeth on such materials has made Florence rather like the image of ancient Rome that Florentine historians confronted in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: shaping the landscape for better and for worse. Most of the participants in this volume were trained by the generation of American scholars who initiated the American encounter with the Italian archives, such as William Bowsky, Gene Brucker, David Herlihy, Marvin Becker, and Richard Goldthwaite, preceded by such German emigrés as Hans Baron, who spent a large part of his career in the United States. We are the direct progeny, in other words, of the renaissance of Florentine studies in the postwar period, even though many of us have moved in other directions in search of new historical terrain.
The direct relationship between Florentine studies and the diffusion of Italian history suggests the irony of the title. In many respects, we have hardly moved “beyond Florence” at all. Bill Bowsky is an excellent example of this trajectory. Having deliberately chosen to make Siena—a republic that resisted Florence’s attempts to annex it until the early sixteenth century—the subject of his considerable research to show its differences from the better-studied Florentine model, in recent years he has returned to Florence to take advantage of its abundant archives for religious history. Florence continues to be a key point of reference for work on late medieval and early modern Italy and the centerpiece of study of the Italian Renaissance. But we are much more aware of the possibilities of sources in other Italian archives than we used to be. These essays as a whole testify to the wealth and range of materials that social historians continue to uncover in the Italian archives and the diffusion of many of the research techniques developed by Florentine scholars. At the same time, we should remain well aware of the fundamental differences to which historians of Italy must attend. No single city or region can sum up such a variegated landscape, or stand as the model against which all others are measured. To invoke the second part of our title, this volume explores some of the contours of Italy from the Middle Ages through the seventeenth century.
It creates a landscape against which to evaluate the current state of Florentine studies, the resurgence of Venetian studies, renewed interest in Italy under Spanish rule, and the continued development of many other regional histories that were formerly deemed the province of local history and are now of considerably greater interest to scholars who use these local histories as case studies to facilitate a broader understanding of Italy as a whole. Juxtaposing case studies, we invite readers to consider fruitfully how we might compare developments in political systems and law, urban and rural life, religion and society throughout the Italian peninsula. Given the complexity of Italy’s politics from the age of the communes to the era of hereditary principalities and foreign rule, no single volume can hope to reflect the range of work being done today on medieval and early modern Italy or encompass the myriad communes, city-states, duchies, principalities, and regions under foreign rule that defined Italy during these centuries. Beyond Florence offers a representative sample of current scholarship to an English-speaking audience. It reflects on what has preceded and inspired this work and suggests what might emerge from it. Implicitly, it invites the reader to consider the possibility of a more continuous history of Italy from the age of the communes to the decline of the early modern republics and principalities.
What were the principal features of this world? To what extent did social, political, and religious factors create a common culture, as much as divide it into many Italies? Nineteenth-century historians insisted on the value of distinct and allencompassing historical epochs, but we have not done so for a long time. We have often avoided the issue entirely, since it is hard to break out of one’s own specialized niche and survey the longue durée. Recognizing that this is rarely the task of an individual historian, we have tried to create a collective project that, in its organization, allows readers to consider some of the major themes in Italian history across the medieval and early modern periods.
These themes are not new; rather, it is their enduring value to the social and urban history of Italy and their intrinsic interest to often artificially separated fields of medieval and early modern Italy that make them well worth revisiting through new case studies. We have organized the volume into five distinct parts. The first, with chapters by Gene Brucker and Paula Findlen, offers a historiographic reflection on the relationship between Florentine Renaissance studies and the development of medieval and early modern Italian history. Part II, with chapters by Samuel Cohn, George Dameron, Duane Osheim, and Robert Brentano, examines one of the fundamental themes of Italian history—the relationship between city and countryside—looking at the Tuscan and Umbrian countryside in particular.
The third part, with chapters by Carol Lansing and Laurie Nussdorfer, discusses legal and notarial culture by examining two case studies in Bologna and Rome. Part IV explores the intersection of urban and religious identity through a series of case studies by Robert Davis, Robert Cooper, Cynthia Polecritti, and Jennifer Selwyn, discussing respectively Venice, the Marches of Ancona, Siena, and the Kingdom of Naples. The final part examines what Maureen Miller, in her comparative study of the urban form of the medieval city, aptly describes as the topographies of power. Her chapter is complemented by studies of politics and urban life in the cities of Orvieto, Modena, and Rome, written by David Foote, Michelle Fontaine, and Thomas Dandelet. In his Afterword, Randolph Starn returns to the question of whether or how historical studies can move beyond the field’s concern with Florence, especially since the Renaissance and Florence remain central images for students of European History. Even contributions that offer exceptions, he observes, do so to a Florentine rule. He makes clear what is implicit in the chapters that make up the heart of the volume: as much as moving beyond Florence, the authors of these works are moving beyond simple visions of Florence and Italy.
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