George Dameron

Revival Preachers and Politics in Thirteenth-Century Italy: The Great Devotion of 1233.

Part I The Great Devotion of 1233: the coming of the preachers the great prophet of Bologna peace campaigns in the North. Part II Revivalism and politics: the making of a revival the revivalist as miracle-worker the revivalist as peace-maker the revivalist as arbiter the revivalist as legislator conclusion - revivals and politics.

Episcopal Power and Florentine Society, 1000-1320

Preface Maps Introduction 1. The Emergence of the Patrilineage and the Conflict with Episcopal Interests 2. The Bishop, the City, and the Contado in the Twelfth Century 3. Rural Communes and the Challenge to Episcopal Hegemony in the Countryside, 1180-1250 4. Episcopal Property and the Transformation of Florentine Society, 1250-1320 Conclusion Abbreviations Appendix A. Chronology of Florentine Bishops to 1321 Appendix B. Comparison of a Bullettone Entry with Its Model Appendix C. Episcopal Castelli in the Diocese of Florence, 1000-1250 Appendix D. Entries in the Bullettone According to Date, Region, and Type Notes Bibliography Index

The cult of St Minias and the struggle for power in the diocese of Florence, 1011–1018

Foundation of churches and monasteries in the tenth and eleventh centuries often have more to do with economic and political concerns than they have to do with religious motivation. Though historians have long recognized the importance of the basilica of San Miniato al Monte in Florence for the history of the Tuscan romanesque, they have largely failed to see that its foundation stemmed from conflicts over competing interests between rival families in the northern Tuscan elite. The tenth and early eleventh centuries saw the formation of several powerful family lineages (consorterie) in northern Tuscany, which organized their regional patrimonies into proprietary monasteries. Two of those lineages — the Guidi and the Cadolingi — derived much of their wealth from the seizure of properties formerly held by the bishops of Florence. Endowing its two proprietary monasteries at Fucecchio and Settimo at the end of the tenth and beginning of the eleventh centuries with a patrimony which may have included lands cla...

Feeding the Medieval Italian City-State: Grain, War, and Political Legitimacy in Tuscany, c. 1150–c. 1350

The failure of any state to guarantee adequate access to food for its citizens can undermine political legitimacy and imperil its survival. Success with food security can, however, contribute to domestic stability and legitimacy. In 1976, as a Peace Corps volunteer living in West Africa, I experienced a terrible subsistence crisis in Benin that threatened to topple the then-revolutionary Marxist-Leninist regime in power. By 1977 the government had singled out both speculators (commerçants méchants) andwitches (sorcières) for blame for the high corn prices anddrought. Six and a half centuries earlier (sometime after 1336), Domenico Lenzi observed in his chronicle, Lo specchio umano, that good and bad harvests alike were the results of God’s will to reward or punish men for their actions. Although twentieth-century Benin is very different from fourteenth-century Tuscany, the governing elites of both recognized that they faced extreme political vulnerability in times of drought and food shortages. Whereas public officials within the Beninese government in 1976 faulted the speculators and “witches” for the troubles, chroniclers andwriters representing elite opinion inmedieval Italian city-states blamed any number of causes, including political rivals, the forces of nature, hoarders, or, above all, the vices and sins of their own communities.

The Companion to Medieval Society by Franco Cardini (review)

Recently some major publishers have produced an array of “companions” and “handbooks” on a variety of topics associated with the humanities. Among the most recent additions to this growing body of literature is The Companion to Medieval Society by Franco Cardini. Cardini is one of the foremost (and also one of the most prolific) Italian historians of the Middle Ages. A professor at the University of Florence, he has published on an impressive range of subjects, including knighthood, magic and witchcraft in the Middle Ages, St. Francis of Assisi, the significance of 1492 for Europe, St. Joan of Arc, and the history of Florence and Tuscany, among many others. The Companion to Medieval Society is the English translation of the Italian text that appeared the same year, La società medioevale (Milan, 2012), and it is a book that contains impressive flashes of insight and sumptuous illustrations. It is also a text marred by numerous errors.

Bishops, Saints, and Historians: Studies in the Ecclesiastical History of Medieval Britain and Italy (review)

The paradigmatic shifts in scholarship that have marked recent decades are evident in more than the geographical scope of this volume. Attention to changing critical theories and methods is everywhere evident. Anthropology; material and documentary evidence; gender studies; ritual and performance studies; and various cultural, social, and literary methodologies are all at work. Attunement to differences in forms, developments, and practices across different political and cultural entities is a constant emphasis. One is left quite deliberately with a mosaic of myriad colorful tesserae.There are surely broad patterns and sweeping designs,but just as surely,no sharply formed,definitive shapes.

Making Agreements in Medieval Catalonia: Power, Order, and the Written Word, 1000-1200 (review)

other material beneats for workers, but at a price: He expected thorough deference from his skilled hands and was offended by their solidarities and desire to think for themselves. In fact, Smith’s discussion of shopooor and union relations is sketchy and reserved at once, as is his rendering of Aimé’s attention to Action Française and his late embrace of devout Catholicism. Thus, Smith’s conclusion that “unintended consequences of rapid wartime growth included the erosion of a traditional pattern of trusted relations between workers and patron” rings hollow, particularly in light of the regional metalworkers’ strike in 1906 and Aimé’s heavy-handed assessment of troubling hands—assessments that the workers themselves would have surely anticipated (69). While Smith laments the cultural rigidities that settled the rank of patron on Jean, Aimé’s ineffectual son, as well as Jean’s generational revenge against his own son Robert, who desperately tried to reform the failing arm, his tale also accounts for the durability of the French arm. Without “modern” trappings—a phrase that Smith adopts easily and uncritically—and “professional managers,” Bouchayer et Viallet prospered for a century. That the arm did so was no mean feat in the modern era of professionally managed arms with far shorter lifespans, such as Enron and WorldCom.

Community and Clientele in Twelfth-Century Tuscany: The Origins of the Rural Commune in the Plain of Lucca (review)

count of Savoy at considerable cost to the commune, called the “compte du chemin” of 1 denier mauriçois on each cart of merchandise using his road, the proceeds being used to keep up the road and a fortiacation. Since the data provide the exact number of foreign carts passing through Villeneuve at any one time, the signiacance of these extraordinary statistics could have been more fully explored. When the customs tolls declined at the end of the thirteenth century, communal tax burdens fell increasingly on the inhabitants through anes, permissions, oaths of bourgeoisie, land taxes, and levies for such fortiacations and expenditures as the merchandise storage depot, or grenette. In spite of the difaculty of planning ahead, deacits were not a problem in the thirteenth century, though they were greater in the fourteenth. Larger taxes offset large expenses, and communal borrowing was sometimes necessary. Reimbursement was often hidden in accounting adjustments. The second half of the book is devoted to the edition of the accounts per se. The editorial work on this difacult material is performed adroitly. Readers are assisted by preliminary discussion and especially by the general analysis following the actual transcription and edition of the accounts in which Thévenaz breaks out receipts and expenses as a guide to the otherwise arcane material. A lengthy section of auxiliary documents follows the analysis. Although the absence of ascal inventories prevents discussion of apportionment of tax levies, Thévenaz’s repertory of the names appearing in the accounts will permit future exploration of the social and economic history of the town. Greater attention to the politics, geography, and demography of Villeneuve would have been desirable, but Thévenaz had a much narrower purpose in this book, which she executed admirably.

Episcopal lordship in the diocese of Florence and the origins of the commune of San Casciano Val di Pesa, 1230–1247

The relationship between town and country (contado) and the origin of the rural commune in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Tuscany are two problems that have long intrigued historians of medieval Italy. An analysis of the nature of the lordship of one of the most powerful rural lords (the bishops of Florence) in the diocese of Florence can offer important insights into both these issues. Focusing on a region in the upper Pesa river valley that was part of the episcopal estate (mensa), a close examination of the social, economic, and political changes in the area between 1150 to 1250 reveals that resistance to episcopal lordship by former episcopal vassals (fideles) and officials led directly to the formation of the commune of San Casciano Val di Pesa. In the early thirteenth century the bishops commuted traditional dues on their lands (work obligations or rents in money or kind) to grain payments and appointed feudal officials to enforce those rent payments in order to achieve two goals: to end earlier fo...