ITALIANO: Anche in età medievale l'organizzazione del territorio costituisce rivelatore ed esito di politiche di diverso respiro, in cui possono interagire una larga gamma di attori, che plasmano e riconfigurano spazi di intervento. La realtà ligure è qui sondata attraverso quattro situazioni – separate cronologicamente, ma con un minimo comune denominatore nella bassa visibilità e nella scarsa efficacia dell'incastellamento – che vedono protagonisti la maggior città, Genova, sia nel definire il suo immediato circondario tra secolo X e XI, sia nel fissare i primi caposaldi dell'espansione territoriale costiera nel secolo XII; gruppi signorili che originano da pubblici uffici, poggiano su una consistente base di terre e di poteri e nel secolo XIII riqualificano la propria presenza intervenendo sull'assetto insediativo rurale; un piccolo villaggio dell'entroterra osservato in maniera ravvicinata fino alle soglie dell'età moderna. / ENGLISH: The organization of political space results from shifting equilibria where a range of actors interact, continuosly resettling specific ambits. Ligurian is sampled via four situations in different centuries but all characterized by low visibility and modest effectivness of castles. Genoa is analized first as it defines its territory in the 10th-11th centuries, and then as it establishes strongholds for expansion along the coast in the 12th century; powerful lords remoulding the form of rural settlements in the 13th century are examined; an inland village is closely observed up to early modern times.
This essay discusses the historiography of Western medieval political thought, as reflected in "Il pensiero politico medievale" by Gianluca Briguglia and "Il potere al plurale: un profilo di storia del pensiero politico medievale" by Roberto Lambertini and Mario Conetti. These two volumes propose vastly different approaches to the topic both in terms of chronology and focus, the first focusing mainly on texts, the other primarily on practices and institutions. Read in conjunction with one another, these books testify to the complexities involved in conceptualizing the emergence and development of political ideas in Europe between the fall of the Roman Empire in the West and the era of the Renaissance and the Reformation.
For a long time, in Europe, the theme of the Antique, before hypo-statizing itself in images of ruins during the Modern Age, referred to an eminently ideological dimension, essentially very far from investigations about cities and landscapes marked by history. Even in the mirror of Middle Age Italy, a country so widely marked by settling civilizations, commercial, productive or religious values were those that most attracted the attention of merchants and pilgrims towards urban territories and centers described or just quoted by chronicles and correspondences where potential antiquarian references pointed out, at most, ancient consular roads and places linked with the commemoration of Christian martyrs and saints. In point of fact, the idea of an Eternal City – although it was a long-lasting political and administrative model until the XVth century at least – is in itself an abstraction, an idea essentially unrelated to the physical texture of its Imperial-age buildings and of its urban landscape. Like Rome, the Phlegraean Fields to the West of Naples were also a landscape of ruins. Nevertheless those ruins, thanks to a thriving thermalism, reflecting Imperial-age balnea, continued attracting the nobility and many pilgrims during the Middle Ages, thus qualifying the territory as an outstanding exemplum Naturae et Artis at a time when most other places later canonized as workshops of the Antique were little more than a distant "elsewhere".
Research into the legal status of foreigners in East Adriatic medieval urban communities is, unfortunately, hindered by the lack of sources. This insurmountable obstacle does not permit a deeper and more comprehensive insight into this challenging topic. The legal status of foreigners may only be studied for the period from the second half of the thirteenth and, especially, early fourteenth century onwards. It is in this period and thanks to the revival of the Roman law that East Adriatic urban communes, following the example set by their Italian counterparts, began to set down their own collections of written laws (statutes). The statutes paid attention to the regulation of the legal status of foreigners. The statutes are indeed the richest and the most important sources for this topic. Yet it is important to keep in mind that the diversity of the socio-economic and political concerns of each individual commune shaped their individual attitudes towards foreigners. This diversity makes a general appraisal of the legal status of foreigners in East Adriatic communes difficult. The best we can do is to point out certain trends in the statutory legislations. Following the example set by the twelfth and thirteenth century trading contracts, with which the urban communes regulated free trade between them and ensured the personal and material security of its merchants, many of the statutes' regulations focused on the issues around the property and procedural criminal law, as well as law proceedings. These regulations provided foreigners with legal protection against arbitrary acts committed by the host town and provided a swift legal action in the case of material or personal injury. Yet in order to protect their own interests as well as the interests of their citizens, the communes often applied various exclusions to the regulations concerning foreigners. These exclusions were mostly expressed in the area of the law of obligations (securing obligations, cession, claims, loans, borrowing, purchase contracts etc.) as well as the material law and in particular the property law. The most important exclusion concerning the foreigner's right to property—indeed one that received the greatest amount of attention in the statutes—was the limitation to their ownership of real estate. Limitations in this area were not as rigid as it may seem at first glance, as the statutory regulations in certain communes did give (conditional) right to own real estate. In most cases, purchase of real estate required the concurrence of the communal body in charge, or the bestowal of residence rights (habitator). Yet foreigners who had been granted residence and then moved away at their own will, in some towns faced punishment by confiscation of their immovable assets. In some cases, the rights of the foreigner-owner of the real estate were limited so that s/he was permitted to bequest their real estate only to the persons not subject to secular authorities—ie the clerics. This prohibition, however, applied equally to the town dwellers and to foreigners. Furthermore, with respect to the acquisition of the property, foreigners suffered explicit limitations. An example is the regulation that prohibited the residents to name the foreigner as their heir, or the prohibition from participating in public auctions. Other limitations to the foreigners' right to own property specified in the town statutes referred, for the most part, to their movable assets, that is the products and the commodities they traded (wheat, wine, salt, wood). These goods were of vital importance for the economic life of the commune. Similar limitations may be found in regulations concerning exploitation of communal natural resources. As the examples above indicate, the statutory legislation was first and foremost focused upon the regulation of those questions that the commune considered especially important from a long-term perspective. Yet as sources for the history of the legal status of foreigners in East Adriatic communal societies, the statutes are insufficient.
This short text presents reflections drawn from the essays collected in this special issue as well as from the debates of the Salamanca symposium where they originated. It does not purport to represent the authors' ideas beyond what is strictly necessary for my argument. Firstly, I make a critical review of how political collapse is addressed in the different contributions, within a comparative perspective. Secondly, I suggest some theoretical approaches than can contribute to develop a comparative perspective on the endings of the early medieval kingdoms, based upon the notions of complexity, scale and agency.
ITALIANO: Nell'articolo si ricostruisce il punto di avvio ottocentesco della storiografia sull'arte medievale dell'Italia meridionale, cioè un vasto territorio, politicamente autonomo rispetto al resto della Penisola, rimasto al margine degli studi specialistici almeno fino agli anni Trenta del XIX secolo. Si prende in esame in particolar modo la figura di Heinrich Wilhelm Schulz (1808-1855), provando a individuare l'originario contesto di formazione intellettuale e storica, e confrontando le sue indagini storico-artistiche, ma prima di tutto storiche in senso lato, con l'interesse che quel territorio suscitò in Italia e in Europa negli anni a cavallo tra Ottocento e Novecento. / ENGLISH: The article deals with the beginning of historiography on medieval art in Southern Italy during the nineteenth century. This vast territory, which was politically independent from the rest of the Peninsula, remained on the sidelines of specialist studies at least until the thirties of the nineteenth century. The figure of Heinrich Wilhelm Schulz (1808-1855) is discussed in particular. His intellectual and historical background is attempted to reconstruct and his art-historical investigations, to be considered historical in a broad sense, are compared to the interest for the South that arose in Italy and Europe between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
ITALIANO: L'organizzazione socio-politica e la cultura del potere di un'importate città-stato medievale costituiscono il collante dei saggi qui raccolti. L'approccio alla storia di Genova tocca diversi ambiti che esulano dalla mera realtà cittadina, con puntate sul territorio, soprattutto della Riviera di Levante. È la storia di una comunità di uomini intraprendenti che proiettano in varie direzioni le loro ambizioni e il desiderio di affermazione. Le strategie politiche, le dinamiche sociali, il linguaggio delle istituzioni e degli uomini che le esprimono concorrono a delineare gli instabili assetti di una città che tenta, senza riuscirvi, di approdare nel Quattrocento a forme di governo e di autorappresentazione pari a quelle maturate in altri ambiti italiani. / ENGLISH: The social and political organization and the power culture of an important medieval city-state constitute the glue of the essays recollected here. The approach to the history of Genoa concerns different aspects, which lie outside from the mere small town reality, with raids on the territory especially in Riviera di levante. It is a history of enterprising men, which project in different directions their own ambitions and their desire to achievement. The homely strategies, the social dynamic, the language of institutio and society come together to outline the unsettled orders of Genoa which tries, unsuccessfully, to come in the fifteenth century to government and representation forms similar to ones completed in others Italian spheres.
ITALIANO: Il contributo esamina in primo luogo la plurisecolare vicenda dei rapporti fra gli archivi cittadini di Bologna e l'erudizione storica locale, a partire dalle cronache bolognesi del Duecento, che trovano nella Camera actorum dell'antico Comune le loro fonti di riferimento; nella seconda parte invece si prende in considerazione il momento dell'istituzione dell'Archivio di Stato di Bologna (1874) e il ruolo allora attribuito alle fonti del periodo comunale, come elementi costitutivi della identità culturale e politica dell'Italia unita. / ENGLISH: Subject of the paper is the longstanding relationship between the city archives of Bologna and historiography, starting from the chronicles of the thirteenth century, whose sources were in the Camera actorum Comunis; the second part analyses the establishment of the Archivio di Stato of Bologna (1874), and the role of the archives of the commune in contributing to the construction of the Italian cultural and political identity.
La consultazione di numerose fonti inedite ed edite ha permesso di accertare l'errata at-tribuzione di cognomi illustri – e quindi gli inesistenti legami con i relativi potenti casati – a un Santo e a uno, e molto probabilmente a due, arcivescovi, tutti attivi a Genova nel XII e nel XIII secolo. L'errore, solidamente affermatosi nel corso dell'Ottocento, è stato acriticamente recepito anche nella storiografia specialistica con esiti di discreto peso politico. L'abbaglio ri-guarda sant'Ugo, la cui appartenenza al casato alessandrino Canefri è frutto di un clamoroso falso settecentesco e il cui profilo biografico entro l'Ordine ospedaliero giovannita va proba-bilmente rivisto. Tocca Ottone, quarto arcivescovo genovese attivissimo dal 1203-1239, abu-sivamente arruolato entro la famiglia Ghilini, di nuovo alessandrina, da uno scrittore di quel cognome desideroso di illustrare il proprio casato. E con grande verosimiglianza riguarda un altro Ugo, secondo arcivescovo della sede genovese coinvolto nelle grandi vicende locali tra il 1163 e il 1188; a lui è attribuito il cognome Della Volta sempre per desiderio di collegamento con un uomo rinomato e probabilmente in base alla lettura forzatamente estensiva di una i-scrizione tuttora esistente.
This paper explores violence against religious houses as an indicator of the limits of political negotiation and consensus building in early medieval polities. It analyses records of attacks against religious houses and clerics from León (NW Iberia) that escape traditional interpreta- tions of violence as a tool in the negotiation of social relations, and construes the events as an ex- pression of local social cleavages. In so doing, it provides a guideline for probing similar records in ways that might illuminate aspects of social relations and dynamics otherwise obscured by the dominant themes of the documentary sources from this period.
The history of emotions is a burgeoning field—so much so, that some are invoking an "emotional turn." As a way of charting this development, I have interviewed three of the leading practitioners of the history of emotions: William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns. The interviews retrace each historian's intellectual-biographical path to the history of emotions, recapitulate key concepts, and critically discuss the limitations of the available analytical tools. In doing so, they touch on Reddy's concepts of "emotive," "emotional regime," and "emotional navigation," as well as on Rosenwein's "emotional community" and on Stearns's "emotionology" and offer glimpses of each historian's ongoing research. The interviews address the challenges presented to historians by research in the neurosciences and the like, highlighting the distinctive contributions offered by a historical approach. In closing, the interviewees appear to reach a consensus, envisioning the history of emotions not as a specialized field but as a means of integrating the category of emotion into social, cultural, and political history, emulating the rise of gender as an analytical category since its early beginnings as "women's history" in the 1970s.
The establishment of the diocese of Bobbio in 1014 and the subsequent building of the episcopal complex are to be framed against the backdrop of the settlement which, from the Early Middle Ages, developed around the monastery founded in the early years of the 7th century following a joint initiative of Saint Columbanus and Agilulf, the Lombard sovereign. At the current state of research, there are no archaeological attestations regarding the initial phases of the settlement. Written sources, on the other hand, only let us imagine the structure of a progressively developing settlement, which remained tightly tied to the monastery and therefore organised in a castrum, mentioned towards the beginning of the 11th century. Late medieval documents are more abundant and therefore enable to reconstruct with more precision the configuration of the center. In this regard, apart from the original fortified structure, we can perceive the development of the center itself, to which we cannot attribute an urban dimension, even from a demographic point of view. Within such context, the development of the episcopal complex – whose main components were the cathedral, the canonry and the episcopal palace, which probably originated in the plebs created by the monastery in order to service the lay population gathered around the institution – was at the basis of a reorganization of the urban fabric. Such a reorganization can be evaluated from a long-term perspective holding the episcopal complex as a centripetal force which attracted not merely religious functions (but also commercial, residential, political and administrative), capable of influencing the set up of wide sectors of the settlement.
ITALIANO: La discussione comparata dei due compendi valorizza in particolare l'impianto didattico e la contestualizzazione storica delle fonti che offre nuove prospettive conoscitive per la storia del pensiero politico medievale. Si segnalano le novità specifiche dei due testi. Tra di esse l'importanza del sapere giuridico nel volume di Lambertini - Conetti, la centralità di Brunetto Latini e di Tolomeo da Lucca in Briguglia, la ridiscussione del peso dell'aristotelismo politico in entrambi i volumi. Si propone inoltre una rilettura della concezione del dominium proposta nel De regia potestate di Quidort confrontandola con la testualità che discute della proprietà e dello statuto della moneta nel XIV secolo. Una secondo confronto viene proposto tra la posizione di Quidort e le discussioni sulla natura personale delle imposte patrimoniali elaborate dai giuristi Bérmond de Montferrier e Pierre Jame tra fine XIII e pieno XIV secolo. / ENGLISH: The comparative discussion of the two volumes highlights their specific didactic approach and the historical contextualization of the sources thus offering new perspectives on the history of medieval political thought. The specific features of the two books are also underlined. Among them: the relevance of legal knowledge in the volume by Lambertini and Conetti, the centrality of Brunetto Latini and Tolomeo da Lucca in Briguglia's, the reapparaisal of the role of politi-cal aristotelianism, which is shared by the three scholars. Moreover, the volumes reconsider Quidort's conception of dominium, expressed in his De potestate regia, by comparing it to the textualiy that discussed the ownership and status of money in the 14th century. Secondly, this same concept of Quidort is compared to the discussion about the personal nature of property taxes elaborated by two jurists, Bérmond de Montferrier and Pierre Jame between the end of 13th and the mid-14th century.
ITALIANO: Il saggio si propone di fornire una possibile soluzione a un antico enigma che è al tempo stesso storiografico e archivistico: perché i libri contabili basso medievali e rinascimentali sono presenti negli archivi fiorentini (e più in generale toscani) con una abbondanza quasi straripante, di fronte a un panorama italiano (per non dire europeo) assai magro? Per quale motivo tra Firenze e Prato si conservano, per i secoli XIII-XVI, più libri di conto che in tutta l'Europa messa insieme? E infine, come spiegare che gli archivi familiari dei nobili fiorentini conservassero, ancora in tarda età granducale, mastri, registri di cassa e giornali redatti alcuni secoli addietro, la cui utilità pratica era apparentemente pari a zero? Lavorando su molteplici fronti, quello della storia economica, quello della storia delle tecniche e della formazione culturale, quello della storia politico-sociale, l'autore mette a confronto il caso fiorentino con quello delle altre grandi città mercantili italiane, proponendo infine una immagine di Firenze leggermente diversa da quella stereotipata di culla dell'Umanesimo. / ENGLISH: The essay aims to provide a possible solution to an old historiographical and archival enigma: why are late medieval and Renaissance account books present in Florentine (and more generally Tuscan) archives with an almost overflowing abundance, as compares to the rather scant Italian (not to say European) panorama? Why have more account books dating from the 13th and 16th centuries been preserved between Florence and Prato than in the rest of Europe? And finally, how can we explain that even in the late grand-ducal age the family archives of the Florentine nobles still preserved ledgers, cashbooks and journals written a few centuries earlier, despite these writings seemingly had no practical usefulness whatsoever? By employing multiple perspectives – economic history, the history of techniques and cultural formation, socio-political history – the author compares the Florentine case with other great Italian mercantile cities, in the end yielding a picture of Florence slightly different from the stereotyped image of the cradle of Humanism.
Attraverso l'analisi di alcune teorie filosofiche islamiche medievali, l'articolo intende indagare la tipologia di approccio che autori come Avicenna e Averroè adottarono nei confronti di religioni diverse da quelle di origine (ebraismo, cristianesimo, zoroastrismo e sabeismo) ed elaborare una riflessione sul concetto di universalità nella religione islamica. Analizzerò le loro dottrine sull'insegnamento profetico, tenendo presenti le fonti platoniche da cui esse si svilupparono, e illustrerò i motivi per cui esse occuparono un posto fondamentale nella scienza politica e le finalità di queste teorie. Attraverso il confronto con diversi studiosi, che nei loro articoli hanno prestato attenzione alla domanda sulla naturalità o sulla positività della Legge islamica, cercherò di andare all'origine della questione, indagando quale fosse il messaggio universale che essi rintracciarono nella Legge rivelata e il motivo che li indusse a presentarlo come rivolto all'intero genere umano.
