Christopher F. Black, Early Modern Italy: A Social History (London
and New York: Routledge, 2001), xiv + 279pp (5 maps), ISBN
0415214343 [paperback] ISBN 0415109353 [hardback]
Christopher Black’s survey of Early Modern Italy forms part of a series
of volumes entitled ‘A Social History of Europe’, aimed at students,
scholars and what the author amusingly describes as ‘that mythical beast,
the General Reader’. Black sets out to cover a broad selection of the
social relationships that regulated the lives of people living in the many
cities and rural areas of the Italian peninsula during the period c. 14271760. As such, the scope and ambitions for the volume are immense as
urban and rural, elite and plebeian, clan and parish, all jostle for a
representative space to be illustrated from examples drawn from across
Italy.
Perhaps the most useful achievement of this volume is to have
somewhat redressed the usual imbalance that sees both survey and
specialist literature concentrating on the two thirds of the peninsula north
of Rome. Breaking from this pattern, Black makes ample forays into case
examples drawn from Naples and the vast rural territories of the south
(Campania, Puglia, Calabria and, to a lesser extent, Sicily), outlining for
example, the land-ownership patterns of the rural estates (latifondi) by the
urbanised nobility of Naples. In a similar spirit, examples are drawn from
the less well-known centres of Genoa, Milan, Brescia, Bologna and
Perugia as well as the canonical Florence, Venice and Rome. In this, the
author has been able to make a useful synthesis of the growing specialist
literature, much of it in Italian, which addresses specific case examples of
individual cities, bringing together common themes that are manifest in
the social patterns of diverse localities.
A similar variety is displayed in the construction of the volume,
which builds upwards in layers from a political and topographical
discussion of the fragmented nature of the peninsula in the first two
chapters.
Developing the common theme of Italy’s precocious
urbanisation, Black describes the dependence of cities upon the
countryside and the nature of control exerted by urban elites upon the
productive but disenfranchised agricultural working communities. Ample
discussion is made of the varied structures of top-down control imposed
by cities on their contado, including Venetian administration of the
Terraferma estates, central-Italian mezzadria systems and southern
latifondi, while less attention is paid to the social conditions of the rural
populations. The author’s greater interest, however, is directed to the
city, where three-quarters of the book is set. An all-too-brief section
outlines the physical setting of urban life, both in the domestic sphere of
the home, and the shared ‘urban scene’, with greater energies expended
on topics such as professions, guilds and confraternities, family and
marriage, neighbourhood, parish and minority residential arrangements,
such as ghettos.
The material used to describe these different
relationships and social structures is drawn from many different periods
and places, so that convincing arguments are often made to show
common elements across a long period. In other instances, the survey or
summary approach leaves the reader wondering about the general validity
of selected examples.
As a specialist of Italian confraternities—see his Italian
Confraternities of the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge University Press,
1989)—Black is well-qualified to consider the social structures which
bound and divided peoples’ lives. While confraternity studies require an
evidently interdisciplinary approach, involving as they do such diverse
angles of approach as popular culture, belief, social bonds, ritual practices
and so on, nonetheless there is something of a shortage of appraisal of the
social impact of architectural and town-planning matters: the social
function of the formal settings of peoples’ lives. As so often with books
concentrating on social history, the every-day physical setting of all
social interactions is superficially touched upon and described neither
with maps nor illustrations (there is one map of Venice, which is scarcely
discussed in the text). Having said this, Christopher Black’s book
highlights the great variety of angles and approaches that can be brought
to bear on the study of urban society, and illustrates these with an
impressive breadth of examples. This book should remind students and
‘General Readers’ of the complexity and fascination of the reality of the
urban and rural society in Early Modern Italy.
Fabrizio Nevola
University of Warwick