John A. Marino

Economic Idylls and Pastoral Realities: The “Trickster Economy” in the Kingdom of Naples

Traditional European values of noncapitalist wealth preferred “rent to profit, security to risk, tradition to innovation, and, in terms of personal goals, gentility to entrepreneurial skill and renown.” Both in the dynamic, expansive sector of the international economy and in marginal, “retrograde” economies, nonpecuniary values based upon kin, custom, religion, law, and politics openly contradicted the utilitarian assumptions of our contemporary economic theory, spurned reinvestment, and worked against development. How can we balance such premodern conceptions with economic forces that may have been imperfectly understood or not even perceived and, at the same time, give both early modern rationale and economic rationality a place in our descriptions of the old order in Europe? In other words, how can we account for the role of culture in economic decision making?

Spain in Italy politics, society and religion, 1500-1700

Nuanced understanding of the reciprocal nature of Spanish-Italian relations and the rich cultural production that was the product of the far-reaching exchanges between the two peninsulas throughout the early modern period guides the nineteen essays in this volume. The key political reality of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Spanish imperial domination in Italy-formal (Sicily, Sardinia, Naples, Milan), informal (Rome, Genoa, Tuscany), and more neutral or independent (Venice)-introduces the investigation in this volume into the methods and mechanisms of control and collaboration, cooperation and cooptation, assimilation and resistance. The connections between topics and problems in social, administrative, economic, and cultural history follow from political theory and practice. Politics, society, economy, and religion help us see both Spain and Italy more clearly.

The Exile and His Kingdom: The Reception of Braudel’s Mediterranean*

The reception of Fernand Braudel’s La Mediterranee et le monde mediterraneen a l’epoque de Philippe II would appear to be simple and straightforward in the English-speaking world.1 It has been very well documented, with so much written about the book and its author—by Braudel himself, Mme. Paule Braudel (his wife, research assistant, and collaborator from 1933), Braudel’s colleagues, students, followers, admirers, biographers, and journalists—that one may wonder if anything new could possibly be said.2 Pierre Daix’s 1995 biography, for example, counts the great success of La Mediterranee in its diffusion: 2,500 copies of the 1949 edition printed, 50,000 of the 1966 second edition and an initial run of 20,000 of that edition in paperback, with translations of the first edition into Italian and Spanish (in Mexico) in 1953 and of the second edition into English in 1972–73,

Good government in Spanish Naples

Contents: No other book in English offers such a wide-ranging, yet still narrative historical perspective to understand the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Kingdom of Naples in its political-administrative structure and its social and economic foundations.

Mediterranean Studies and the Remaking of Pre-modern Europe

Why have we begun to study the Mediterranean again and what new perspectives have opened up our renewed understanding? This review article surveys recent research in a number of disciplines to ask three questions about Mediterranean Studies today: What is the object of study? What methodologies can be used to study it? And what it all means? The general problem of the object of study in Mediterranean Studies in its ecological, economic, social, political, and cultural dimensions is introduced in a summary of the works of Pergrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, Michael McCormick, Chris Wickham, and David Abulafia. Recent methodologies suggested by Peter Burke, Christian Bromberger, Ottomanists, art historians, and literary scholars emphasize both the macro-historical and micro-historical level in order to understand both the local and the regional, material culture and beliefs, mentalities, and social practices as well as its internal dynamics and external relations. The end results point to three conclusions: the relationship between structures and mechanisms of change internally and interactions externally, comparisons with “other Mediterraneans” outside the Mediterranean, and to connections with the Atlantic World in the remaking of premodern Europe then and now.

A bigger Settecento Italiano: wider vistas and open terrain

This paper introduces the six essays from the UCLA-Clark Library Conference on ‘The Culture of Enlightenment and Reform in Eighteenth-Century Italy’ (23 – 24 January 2004). Franco Venturis persona, productivity, method, and themes are reviewed to help explain his influence on Italian Enlightenment Studies, while at the same time showing how recent research has developed in a number of directions – following up on his insights, exploring new topics, or leaving large questions yet unexamined.

Invisible City: The Architecture of Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Neapolitan Convents: Hills, Helen: New York: Oxford University Press 320 pp., Publication Date: February 2003

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Matrices of Materialist Historiography

The current fascination with material culture has enriched the dialogue between the traditionally complementary disciplines of economics and history. Nevertheless, when they meet in the camp of economic history, economists and historians have found themselves speaking a different language. It is not that the economist finds evenements relating the minutiae of historical research to be the product of long division in the age of computerized equations, or that the deferential historian is chagrined by the marvels of differential calculus. What is at issue between the post-Braudelian world and the post-Keynesian one is not a vocabulary of words as opposed to one of numbers, but rather a divergent perspective born of different assumptions and goals.2 For the economist, there are two universals -statistics and theory. Rules governing publication in the Journal of Economic History and the Economic History Review express this concern by demanding that articles have general theoretical interest-as if particularist historical research were the last bastion of an irrelevant antiquarianism. For the historian, on the other hand, there is only one criterion-meticulous research. Theory remains at best eclectic, at worse nonexistent, always pragmatic, and rarely verbalized. In a review article of Immanuel Wallersteins The Modern World System (Journal of Modern History 48 [1976]: 685-92), for example, Herman Kellenbenz provides a critical summary, probing the historiographical problems simplified or distorted by Wallerstein. Kellenbenz challenges the application of a center-periphery model but never confronts its theoretical implications because, as he himself admits, historians remain impressed if still perplexed by such tours de force. Sharing a common interest is not sharing a common program. The materialist history boom has thus far yielded only an illusory, superficial bond in interdisciplinary studies because of a methodological disjunction in the identification and interpretation of past and present categories. There is no disagreement that materialist history takes as its focus tangible and measurable points of reference in society and economy. But