Littérature scientifique sur le sujet « Italian communal age »

63 young people ( M age = 23.9 yr., SD = 2.4, 50 men, 13 women) belonging to four subculture groups (New American Punk, Cyberpunk, Trash Style, and Rasta-Hippy) were studied to examine the relationship between self-esteem, self-efficacy, and the development of a body modification collection. A survey was created to evaluate quality of life, risk behaviour, and body modification. Self-esteem and self-efficacy were assessed using the Rosenberg Self-esteem Scale and General Perceived Self-efficacy Scale. Belonging to a group which permits neglect of standard norms of communal life makes it possible to avoid facing up to low self-esteem. Adherence to a group appears, from the results of this study, to be correlated with self-efficacy; inability to cope with life situations suggests a state of malaise in these young people.

Research on the early modern Italian Jewish communities shows that this period witnessed a decline of rabbinic authority. From our point of view, one of the signs of this process is the widened scope of situations in which terms previously bound mostly to ritual contexts appear. The article deals with the usage and meaning of the term “minyan” (a quorum of ten men who have reached the age of the religious adulthood necessary for public liturgy) in the first part of the Hevrat Shomerim la-Boker minute book manuscript. Hevrat Shomerim la-Boker is one of the voluntary communal associations of the Venetian Jewish community that was active in the 16–17th centuries. The article examines textual contexts from both chapter and dated notes that contain the term as well as the broader historical context in which these formulae exist. In the first part of the minute book, the term is mentioned five times, three times at the dated notes, two times in the chapter. The analysis of the usage contexts of the term “minyan” revealed that this meaning starts to appear at a wider scope, namely, in administrative contexts. The term also became a part of an idiom that the compiler of the dated notes or scribe used to highlight that a certain procedure was carried out according to the procedural norm and its results are legitimate and accurate.

Abstract Not only do the city registers of medieval Bologna, the Memoriali Bolognesi, contain legal and economic transactions, but they also transmit poetry of the age. Across the decades, the scribes introduced poems between the transactions; over some one hundred such poems have been preserved, many of them unica. Thus, the registers offer a glimpse into the popular entertainments of the times, providing valuable information about the culture of thirteenth-century Italy. One such poem is the ballata “Oi bona gente, oditi et endenditi” (“Oh, good people, hear and understand”), an insulting dialogue between two women. Intended to provoke laughter, the poem traffics in traditional misogynistic stereotypes. Its two antagonists accuse one another of drunkenness, gluttony, but mostly sexual impropriety such as cuckolding their husbands and attempting to pimp one another out to the parish priest. Through analysis of the poem, the anxieties provoked by the socio-economic changes of the Italian communes come into focus. The society was in flux, and the ballata employs the traditional insults of women to address the concerns that it raised.

RiassuntoDopo una breve rassegna sui dati di confronto tra Registri Psichiatrici dei Casi (RPC) disponibili nella letteratura internazionale, vengono analizzati gli indici sociodemografici e i tassi standardizzati (per età e sesso) relativi alle attività assistenziali (anni 1987–90) svolte in cinque aree italiane di RPC. Gli indici socio-anagrafici sono risultati correlati con le caratteristiche urbano-rurali del territorio. In ognuna delle cinque aree di registro esisteva, alia fine del 1990, una rete di servizi considerata adeguata rispetto alle esigenze della popolazione. I tassi totali di prevalenza un giorno sono in lieve aumento in tutte le aree di RPC, mentre quelli di prevalenza un anno e incidenza hanno avuto un andamento piuttosto differenziato nelle varie aree. II ricorso al day-hospital è diventato mediamente piu frequente e l'attività territoriale è aumentata dappertutto. Sono diminuiti parallelamente i ricoveri. II fenomeno della lungodegenza è tuttora presente, anche se in forma ridotta, in alcune aree di RPC. I soggetti lungoospitati in comunità sono aumentati in un'area (Arezzo), diminuiti in un'altra (Caltagirone), mentre sono stabili nelle altre aree. I lungoassistiti sono aumentati in quattro aree e in lieve flessione nella quinta (Arezzo). Non e emersa una relazione tra livelli di assistenza psichiatrica erogata e caratteristiche della popolazione di riferimento. Secondo un punteggio assistenziale ponderato di costo lo sviluppo dell'attività assistenziale ha determinato un aumento dei costi a Verona-Sud e ad Arezzo, una diminuzione a Caltagirone e a Legnano e nessuna variazione a Portogruaro.Parole chiaveservizi psichiatrici territoriali, registri psichiatrici dei casi, utilizzazione dei servizi.SummaryAfter a brief review of the literatur on comparison between Psychiatric Case Registers (PCR), this paper analyzes sociodemografic data and 1987-1990 age/sex standardised rates of psychiatric treatment in five Italian areas with a PCR. There was a correlation between sociodemografic indices and urban-rural characteristics of the areas. At the end of 1990 the comprehensive community psychiatric service of each area was considered able to meet the needs of the population. During the four years of our survey, one-day prevalence rates were consistently slighty increasing, while one-year prevalence and incidence rates showed different trend in the five areas. Overall, there was a development of the community services and a decrease of psychiatric admissions. There were still few hospital long-stay patients in some areas, but what is more evident was the increase of the number of long-term patients (hostel long-stay patients and communiy long-term patients). No correlations were evident between levels of psychiatric treatment and characteristics of the populations in the five areas. The development of a comprehensive network of community services required an increase of the costs in Verona-Sud and Arezzo, a decrease in Caltagirone and Legnano, while there was no variation of costs in Portogruaro.

The effects of translation have been felt in the development of most languages, but it is particularly marked in English language and literature, where it is a highly charged topic because of its fundamental connection with colonial expansion. Britain shaped a "national" literary identity through borrowing from other languages and infected and inflected other languages and literatures in the course of cultural migrations that occurred in Europe since at least the medieval period onward. As Stephen Greenblatt points out in his essay, "Racial Memory and Literary History," the discovery that English is a "mixed, impure, and constantly shifting medium" is not a new one, citing the preface to the first etymological dictionary in English, published in 1689, in which its author describes English as a hybrid tongue: a Composition of most, if not all the Languages of Europe; especially of the Belgick or Low-Dutch, Saxon, Teutonic or High-Dutch, Cambro-British or Welsh, French, Spanish, Italian, and Latin; and now and then of the Old and Modern Danish, and Ancient High-Dutch; also of the Greek, Hebrew, Arabick, Chaldee, Syriack, and Turcick. ((Skinner A3v-A4r, in Greenblatt 52) The "English" literary canon has translated material at its heart; there is the Bible, for instance, and classical works in Greek, which are read and discussed in translation by many who study them. Beowulf is a translation that has been canonized as one of the "original" texts of English literature, and Shakespeare was inspired by translations. Consider, for instance, Greenblatt's description of The Comedy of Errors, where a "Plautine character from a Sicilian city, finding himself in the market square of a city in Asia Minor, invokes Arctic shamanism – and all this had to make sense to a mixed audience in a commercial theater in London" (58), and there is a strong sense of the global cultural discourse that has been translated into a "national" and international canon of literature in English. English as a language and as a literature, however, has not been contained by national boundaries for some time, and in fact is now more comfortably conceived in the plural, or as uncountable, like a multidirectional flow. English has therefore been translated from solid, settled, and certain representations of Anglo-Celtic culture in the singular to a plurality of shifting, hybrid productions and performances which illuminate the tension implicit in cultural exchange. Translation has become a popular trope used by critics to describe that interaction within literatures defined by language rather than nation, and as a mutable and mutual process of reading and reinscription which illuminates relationships of power. The most obvious power relationship that translation represents, of course, is that between the so-called original and the translation; between the creativity of the author and the derivation of the translator. In The Translator's Invisibility (1995), Lawrence Venuti suggests that there is a prevailing conception of the author as a free and unconstrained individual who partially shapes the relationship: "the author freely expresses his thoughts and feelings in writing, which is thus viewed as an original and transparent self-representation, unmediated by transindividual determinants (linguistic, cultural, social) that might complicate authorial individuality" (6). The translation then can only be defined as an inferior representation, "derivative, fake, potentially a false copy" (7) and the translator as performing the translation in the manner of an actor manipulating lines written by someone else: "translators playact as authors, and translations pass for original texts" (7). The transparent translation and the invisibility of the translator, Venuti argues can be seen as "a mystification of troubling proportions, an amazingly successful concealment of the multiple determinants and effects of English-language translation, the multiple hierarchies and exclusions in which it is implicated" (16). That is, translation exerts its own power in constructing identities and representing difference, in addition to the power derived from the "original" text, which, in fact, the translation may resist. Recognition of this power suggests that traditional Western representations of translation as an echo or copy, a slave toiling on the plantation or seductive belle infidèle, each with its clear affinity to sexual and colonial conquest, attempts to deny translation the possibility of its own power and the assertion of its own creative identity. However, the establishment of an alternative power arrangement exists because translations can "masquerade as originals" (Chamberlain 67) and infiltrate and subvert literary systems in disguise. As Susan Stewart contends in Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation, if we "begin with the relation between authority and writing practices rather than with an assumption of authorial originality, we arrive at a quite different sense of history" (9) and, indeed, a different sense of literary creativity. This remainder of this paper will focus on Nicole Brossard's Le désert mauve and Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, to exemlify how a translator may flaunts her creativity, and allow the cultural position of the translator vis à vis language, history, or gender to be critically exposed by the text itself. Québécoise feminist writer Nicole Brossard's 1987 novel, Le désert mauve [Mauve Desert], is perhaps the most striking example of how a translator foregrounds the creative process of reading and re-writing. Brossard constructed her novel by becoming her own reader and asking questions, imagining dialogues between the characters she had already created. This "interactive discourse" shaped the text, which is a dialogue between two versions of a story, and between two writers, one of whom is an active reader, a translator. Le désert mauve is a structural triptych, consisting of Laure Angstelle's novel, Le désert mauve, and Mauve l'horizon, a translation of Angstelle's book by Maude Laures. In the space between the two sites of writing, the translator imagines the possibilities of the text she has read, "re-imagining the characters' lives, the objects, the dialogue" (Interview, 23 April 96). Between the versions of the desert story, she creates a fluid dimension of désir, or desire, a "space to swim with the words" (Interview). Brossard has said that "before the idea of the novel had definitely shaped itself," she knew that it would be in a "hot place, where the weather, la température, would be almost unbearable: people would be sweating; the light would be difficult" (Mauve Desert: A CD-ROM Translation). That site became the desert of the American southwest with its beauty and danger, its timelessness and history, and its decadent traces of Western civilization in the litter of old bottles and abandoned, rusting cars. The author imagined the desert through the images and words of books she read about the desert, appropriating the flowers and cacti that excited her through their names, seduced her through language. Maude Laures, the translator within Brossard's novel, finds the desert as a dimension of her reading, too: "a space, a landscape, an enigma entered with each reading" (133). From her first readings of a novel she has discovered in a used bookshop, Laures, confronts the "the issue of control. Who owns the meaning of the black marks on the page, the writer or the reader?" (Godard 115), and decides the book will belong to her, "and that she can do everything because she has fallen in love with the book, and therefore she's taken possession of the book, the author, the characters, the desert" (Interview). The translator is fascinated by Mélanie, the 15-year-old narrator, who drives her mother's car across the desert, and who has been captivated by the voice and beauty of the geometrician, Angela Parkins, imagining dialogues between these two characters as they linger in the motel parking lot. But she is unwilling to imagine words with l'homme long (longman), who composes beautiful equations that cause explosions in the desert, recites Sanskrit poems, and thumbs through porno in his hotel room. Le désert mauve was an attempt by Brossard to translate from French to French, but the descriptions of the desert landscape – the saguaro, senita, ocotillos, and arroyo—show Spanish to be the language of the desert. In her translation, Maude Laures increases the code switching and adds more Spanish phrases to her text, and Japanese, too, to magnify the echo of nuclear destruction that resonates in l'homme long's equations. She also renames the character l'homme oblong (O'blongman) to increase the dimension of danger he represents. Linking the desert through language with nuclear testing gives it a "semantic density," as Nicholis Entrikin calls it, that extends far beyond the geographical location to recognize the events embedded in that space through associative memory. L'homme long is certainly linked through language to J Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the original atomic bomb project in Los Alamos, New Mexico and his reference to the Bhagavad Gita after seeing the effects of the atomic bomb: "I/am/become Death—now we are all sons of bitches" (17). The translator distances herself by a translating Death/I /am/death—I'm a sonofabitch" (173). The desert imagined by Laure Angstelle seduces the reader, Maude Laures, and her translation project creates a trajectory which links the heat and light of the desert with the cold and harsh reflective glare of sunlit snow in wintry Montréal, where the "misleading reflections" of the desert's white light is subject to the translator's gaze. Laures leans into the desert peopled with geometricians and scientists and lesbians living under poisonous clouds of smoke that stop time, and tilts her translation in another direction. In the final chapter of Laure Angstelle's novel, Mélanie had danced in the arms of Angela Parkins, only to find she had run out of time: Angela is shot (perhaps by l'homme long) and falls to the dance floor. Maudes Laures is constrained by the story and by reality, but translates "There was no more time" into "One more time," allowing the lovers' dance to continue for at least another breath, room for another ending. Brossard has asserted that, like lesbian desire or the translator, the desert was located in the background of our thoughts. Ondaatje's novel, The English Patient (1992), locates the translator in the desert, linking a profession and a place which have both witnessed an averting of Western eyes, both used in linguistic and imperial enterprises that operate under conditions of camouflage. Linked also by association is the war in the Sahara and the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan. As in Brossard, the desert here is a destination reached by reading, how "history enters us" through maps and language. Almásy, "the English patient," knew the desert before he had been there, "knew when Alexander had traversed it in an earlier age, for this cause or that greed" (18). Books in code also serve to guide spies and armies across the desert, and like a book, the desert is "crowded with the world" (285), while it is "raped by war and shelled as if it were just sand" (257). Here the translator is representative of a writing that moves between positions and continually questions its place in history. Translators and explorers write themselves out of a text, rendering themselves invisible and erasing traces of their emotions, their doubts, beliefs, and loves, in order to produce a "neutral" text, much in the way that colonialism empties land of human traces in order to claim it, or the way technology is airbrushed out of the desert in order to conceal "the secret of the deserts from Unweinat to Hiroshima" (295). Almásy the translator, the spy, whose identity is always a subject of speculation, knows how the eye can be fooled as it reads a text in disguise; floating on a raft of morphine, he rewrites the monotone of history in different modes, inserting between the terse lines of commentary a counternarrative of love illumined by "the communal book of moonlight" (261), which translates lives and gives them new meaning. The translator's creativity stems from a collaboration and a love for the text; to deny the translation process its creative credibility is synonymous in The English Patient with the denial of any desire that may violate the social rules of the game of love by unfairly demanding fidelity. If seas move away to leave shifting desert sands, why should lovers not drift, or translations? Ultimately, we are all communal translations, says Ondaatje's novel, of the shifting relationship between histories and personal identities. "We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience" (261). This representation of the translator resists the view of identity "which attempts to recover an immutable origin, a fixed and eternal representation of itself" (Ashcroft 4) by its insistence that we are transformed in and by our versions of reality, just as we are by our readings of fiction. The translators represented in Brossard and Ondaatje suggest that the process of translation is a creative one, which acknowledges influence, contradictory currents, and choice its heart. The complexity of the choices a translator makes and the mulitiplicity of positions from which she may write suggest a process of translation that is neither transparent nor complete. Rather than the ubiquitous notion of the translator as "a servant an invisible hand mechanically turning the word of one language into another" (Godard 91), the translator creatively 'forges in the smithy of the soul' a version of story that is a complex "working model of inclusive consciousness" (Heaney 8) that seeks to loosen another tongue and another reading in an eccentric literary version of oral storytelling. References Ashcroft, Bill. Post-Colonial Transformation. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Brossard, Nicole. Le désert mauve. Montréal: l'Hexagone, 1987. Mauve Desert. Trans. Susanne Lotbinière-Harwood. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1990. Brossard, Nicole. Personal Interview. With Beverley Curran and Mitoko Hirabayashi, Montreal, April 1996. Chamberlain, Lori. "Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation." Reinventing Translation. Lawrence Venuti, Ed. 57-73. Godard, Barbara. "Translating (With) the Speculum." Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction 4 (2) 1991: 85-121. Greenblatt, Stephen. "Racial Memory and Literary History." PMLA 116 (1), January 2001: 48-63. Heaney, Seamus. "The Redress of Poetry." The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures. London, Boston: Faber and Faber, 1995. 1-16. Jenik, Adriene. Mauve Desert: A CD-ROM Translation. Los Angeles: Shifting Horizon Productions, 1997. Ondaatje, Michael. The English Patient. Toronto: Vintage Books, 1993. Stewart, Susan. Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation. New York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991. Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation. London, New York: Routledge, 1995.

Cette étude a comme finalité l’analyse ponctuelle des caractéristiques de la société et des institutions de la ville de Pistoia et de leur évolution dans la période qui va approximativement de la fin du XIIe jusqu’à la moitié du XIIIe siècle. Pistoia, ville considérée comme « mineure » à l’intérieur de la Toscane des « métropoles », possède en effet des caractéristiques propres d’une réalité en rien mineure. A l’intérieur de la première partie, on présentera d’une manière synthétique le tableau général du peuplement, de la disposition territoriale et des structures économiques de la ville et à une plus petite échelle du territoire.Dans la deuxième partie on dessinera la réalité d’une société urbaine de la fin du XIIe siècle dans laquelle les représentants des familles d’origine « seigneurial » occupent, d’une façon manifeste, les charges au sommet des institutions. Vers la fin du XIIe siècle quelques transformations modifient la situation sur le plan social et institutionnel. On assiste en fait à Pistoia comme dans d’autres villes, au développement d’un mouvement soit-disant du « Peuple » qui recueille les aspirations d’une grande partie des familles de la ville qui étaient, jusqu’à alors, exclues du pouvoir.Dans un contexte pareil vient se greffer, aussi à Pistoia, le conflit qui oppose les partisans et les adversaires de Frédéric II, rassemblés respectivement sous les drapeaux gibelin ou guelfe. C’est à partir des années 60 qu'un autre conflit va provoquer des blessures irrémédiables au tissu social, et non seulement, de la ville
The research deals with a careful examination of social, institutional and political characteristics of the city of Pistoia approximately between the end of the XIIth and the mid-XIIIth century. Pistoia is usually considered a less important city than the others in the Tuscan region. The analysis underlines that it isn’t so. In order to explaine these facts, the first chapter briefly describes the general situation of the city’s peopling, territorial structure and economical activities.The analysis leads to an imagine of the civic society at the end of the XIIth century in which the seigneurial families’ members hold the majority of the Comune’s offices. Their relationship with the city is crucial for the institutional developement. By the beginning of the XIIIth century some social and institutional changes alter the situation. Pistoia’s civic society shows a different structure, in which merchant families have more political influence.In this environment the conflict between emperor Frederick the IInd’s supporters and opponents increases, but in a less harsh way than in Florence

La thèse comprend une synthèse neuve associée a des ouvrages déjà publies. Elle analyse la construction de la toscane méridionale, entre la première moitié du XIIe siècle et le milieu du XIVe, comme espace de la commune de sienne (contado). Elle présente d'autre part une étude des comportements sociaux, particulièrement religieux et alimentaires, en Italie centrale. La perspective directrice est celle d'une compréhension et délimitation des espaces. Les communautés du contado sont étudiées dans leur structure de castrum de villa, dans leurs rapports avec leur(s) seigneur(s) et avec certaines institutions religieuses, dans leurs relations et leurs différences avec la ville dominante. L'administration par la ville conduit au découpage du contado en diverses circonscriptions, mais l'unité essentielle reste toujours la communauté villageoise. L'analyse de plusieurs formes de la vie religieuse conduit à identifier des secteurs forestiers, des zones de passage, et des liaisons spécifiques entre certaines zones du contado et des quartiers de la ville. L'art de peindre des sites et la pratique de la mesure des terrains sont envisages comme outils de la centralisation et armes de l'urbanité. La culture urbaine est étudiée aussi dans le domaine de la cuisine et de la table. La ville est créatrice de modes culinaires et soucieuse des rituels de table. L'affrontement entre les usagers urbains et ruraux en la matière se montre plus agressif dans le pays siennois que dans le reste de la toscane. La thèse conclut a une spécificité du domaine siennois dans la confrontation entre une ville très raffinée en sa culture urbaine et un territoire faiblement urbanise
The thesis comprises a new synthesis as well as published articles and books. It presents an analysis of the construction by the Sienese commune of its Contado, extending from the city limits to the whole of southern Tuscany, in the period between the first half of the XIIth and the middle of the XIVth century. It also presents a study of social behavior, particularly concerning the religious and food habits in central Italy. The main directive is the apprehension and the delimitation of space. Contado communes are considered in their castrum and villa forms, their relations with the lord(s) and religious institutions, their connection and differences with the dominant city. The latter's administration led to a partitioning of the Contado into conscriptions, though the essential unit remained the village community. The analysis of various forms of piety and religious life helps to identify forest sectors, transit areas, as well as specific relations between various Contado zones and city quarters. Pictural art and land measure are perceived as tools of centralization and as a means of urbanity. Also studied as a part of urban culture is cuisine, as the city created culinary modes and arts of the table. The opposition between urban and rural culinary customs seems fiercer in the Sienese region than elsewhere in Tuscany. The thesis concludes upon the specificity of the Sienese domain, the confrontation between the highly refined urban culture of a city and a vast but scantily urbanized territory

Cette thèse sur l'histoire du moyen-âge italien retrace l'évolution de la cite d’Arezzo et de son aire d'attraction de c. 715 a c. 1230. La première partie est consacrée à l'écologie historique et aux ressources du monde rural, puis aux conditions paysannes, aux domaines et à la seigneurie foncière, et à l'évolution de ce cadre jusque vers 1100. La 2e partie traite des cadres publics et des équilibres de pouvoir, et de l'histoire politique du comte; des seigneuries 'périphériques'; enfin, du monde des notables locaux. L'église fait l'objet de la 3e partie: l'épiscopat et le clergé séculier d'abord; deux ch. Traitent en suite de l'essor monastique et des principaux monastères. Dans la 4e partie, est étudiée Arezzo précommunale : la cité au haut moyen-âge; l'essor urbain précommunal ; les milieux notables, enfin, la dynamique de pouvoir dans la cite et l'émergence de la commune dans les années 1098-1110. Les 5 derniers chapitres retracent l'histoire arétine des années 1120-1220 : nouvelles conditions économiques, sociales et culturelles ; les vicissitudes du royaume d’Italie et leurs effets locaux jusqu'en 1197; l'évolution institutionnelle et politique de la commune d’Arezzo; puis les aspects structurels de l'essor communal à Arezzo et dans d'autres communes plus petites. Enfin, le dernier chapitre analyse l'évolution de l'église, notamment le renforcement des cadres séculiers et l'essoufflement du dynamisme monastique
This essay in italian medieval history traces the history of the city and territory of Azerro in Tuscany from c. 715 to c. 1230. Its first part is concerned with historical ecology and rural production, then with peasant conditions and status, with manors, and with the alteration of this basic framework to 1100. The 2nd part deals with the exercise of power in the aretine county, then with the main 'peripherical; and endly with the local nobility and gentry the 3rd part is devoted to the church : the bishopric and secular clergy, the rise of monasticism, and the leading aretine monasteries. The 4th part retraces the development of pre-communal arezzo: the city in the early middle ages; the urban and suburban growth ; the urban notables; the trends of power in the city and the birth of the commune in the years 1098-1110. The last five chapters are dealing with aretine history in the years 1120-1220: the changing economic, social and cultural background; the politics of the kingdom of italy and its local effects to 1197; the aretine communal institutions and politics; the structural aspects of communal rise in Arezzo and in lesser communes: law and order, economical regulation, and taxation, and the struggle for communal space. Endly, the last chapter analyses the history and changing balances of the church, especially the strengthening of the secular frame and the slowing down of monastic impulse

L’obiettivo della tesi è quello di analizzare i cambiamenti politico-istituzionali e socio-economici che caratterizzarono la città di Milano dopo la dissoluzione della giurisdizione pubblica in Lombardia. Dal punto di vista politico lo scopo è stato quello di non fermarsi a un’analisi dei cambiamenti avvenuti in una singola istituzione ma approfondire le interazioni tra i vari soggetti attivi nella politica cittadina, sia quelli che agirono attraverso una magistratura sia quelli rimasti su un piano informale. L’attenzione si è focalizzata sulla complessa e composita rete di relazioni che legava le strutture politiche capaci di esprimere una qualche forma di autorità. Si sono cercate, quindi, le motivazioni dei cambi di regimi che si susseguirono tra l’XI e il XII secolo e che sono stati, fino a pochi decenni fa, inquadrati nella classica evoluzione da un sistema di stampo pubblico a una realtà comunale dominata dai consoli e dall’assemblea generale, passando per l’intermezzo del dominio del vescovo. Si è cercato inoltre di analizzare se questi cambiamenti politici abbiano avuto delle ripercussioni sul piano sociale cittadino. In questo ambito si è deciso di focalizzare l’analisi sul gruppo maggiormente interessato dal dibattito accademico: i capitanei. La ragione di questa scelta è la maggiore evidenzia di questo gruppo nella complessa cittadinanza milanese, in cui spesso è difficile distinguere le varie componenti sociali. Inoltre, le conseguenze dei cambiamenti politici sono più facilmente riscontrabili nei capitanei rispetto ad altri raggruppamenti perché i suoi membri riuscirono a rimanere ai vertici della comunità cittadina per un lungo periodo. L’obiettivo è stato quello di cercare le differenze tra le varie casate capitaneali e, qual ora vi fossero, individuare quali siano stati i motivi di tali divergenze e se fossero da ricollegare alle dinamiche del conflitto politico e ai cambiamenti nel panorama governativo urbano. Per questo motivo si è deciso di seguire, per tutte e quattro le famiglie analizzate, una precisa struttura che valuti prima di tutto gli atteggiamenti politici tenuti dalla stirpe e poi consideri le conseguenze delle posizioni politiche sia sul lato economico, analizzando l’evoluzione delle proprietà e delle giurisdizioni nelle campagne o il favore verso attività legate al sistema produttivo urbano quali credito e commercio, sia su quello sociale, cercando di ricostruire la rete di legami delle famiglie. L’obiettivo è stato quello di creare alcuni profili specifici che possano evidenziare le differenze tra le casate capitaneali. Gli estremi cronologici di questa ricerca racchiudono tutto il periodo che viene spesso oggi definito “laboratorio politico comunale”. Il 1056 segnò la conclusione della configurazione politica carolingia che aveva caratterizzato la città fin dal IX secolo. La morte di Enrico III fu l’inizio di uno dei periodi più convulsi nei rapporti politici interni alla città. Invece, la concessione delle prerogative sul proprio territorio del 1187 fu, insieme alla pace di Costanza del 1185, il segno più evidente del consolidamento delle istituzioni milanesi; infatti la configurazione affermatasi dopo lo scontro con il Barbarossa costituì il centro della vita politica milanese almeno fino alla metà del XIII secolo. Lo studio è diviso in due parti: la prima ha un carattere più politico-istituzionale, ripercorrendo i mutamenti avvenuti nello spazio politico milanese tra la metà del XI secolo e l’arrivo del Barbarossa, mentre la seconda parte si incentra sulla ricostruzione della struttura familiare di alcune casate di capitanei. L’inizio si data alla genesi dell’autogoverno cittadino (metà XI secolo – 1111), un’epoca caratterizzata da uno spazio politico informale e molto fluido nel quale prevalse un regime incentrato sulla struttura arcivescovile, a sua volta indebolito da un nuovo periodo di forte conflittualità che caratterizzò la città agli inizi del XII secolo. Inoltre, si sono analizzati i primi effetti sui capitanei della localizzazione dell’autorità politica e giurisdizionale a seguito della disgregazione del potere pubblico nel milanese. Dopo il 1056 i veri protagonisti dello spazio politico cittadino furono prima le coniurationes e, dopo l’inizio dello scontro tra Impero e Papato, le partes. Solo dagli anni Settanta si può constatare una prima formalizzazione degli assetti cittadini. Questa configurazione fu la base del primo vero regime di cui possiamo analizzare la struttura: il regime arcivescovile della pars ecclesiae. Tuttavia, la pluralità del sistema e le tensioni interne tra le coalizioni d’interesse resero fragile la sua amministrazione. L’ascesa di un presule “debole” favorì i mutamenti negli assetti di potere, spostando il baricentro del regime dalla figura dell’arcivescovo a una serie di soggetti dominati da una determinata coalizione d’interesse. La fase successiva arriva fino all’arrivo del Barbarossa in Italia (1111-1154). In questo caso si può rilevare una tendenza di fondo verso una sostanziale istituzionalizzazione dei regimi cittadini. Ai vertici del sistema l’autorità arcivescovile venne affiancata da un’altra serie di realtà capaci di permeare durevolmente l’amministrazione milanese. Una nuova fase di conflitti interni tra fine anni Venti e inizio anni Trenta, portò all’affermazione di una configurazione fondata su due vertici istituzionali, l’arcivescovato e il consolato. Inoltre, si è ritenuto fondamentale allargare lo spazio di analisi a un quadro sovralocale utile a comprendere i riassestamenti della struttura politica urbana. Quindi, il regime di metà XII secolo si presenta come ormai istituzionalizzato; l’aumento, a inizio anni Cinquanta, della presenza dei capitanei nelle liste consolari testimonia il rafforzarsi della posizione della magistratura nella gerarchia politica cittadina; dall’altra parte le due strutture (consolato e arcivescovato) non furono in concorrenza ma collaborarono per governare il sistema cittadino, la civitas. Lo spazio politico, però, non si racchiuse nelle due istituzioni di vertice ma rimase il frutto delle interazioni di più soggetti, in particolare nelle decisioni considerate di rilevanza per l’intera cittadinanza. Le guerre contro il Barbarossa testimoniano gli effetti della localizzazione dell’autorità e dei caratteri sempre più urbani del sistema cittadino. Infatti, si attesta una forte divisione tra capitanei urbani e rurali. I primi difesero strenuamente le prerogative della città, mentre i secondi utilizzarono le disgrazie milanesi durante la guerra contro l’imperatore per sciogliere il gioco cittadino sui loro territori e rendersi indipendenti dalle strutture cittadine, che avevano dominato i comitati nel territorio milanese fin dai primi anni del XII secolo. Le guerre contro il Barbarossa enfatizzarono le divisioni tra il sistema cittadino e la realtà rurale mostrando come lo scarto tra le due aristocrazie fosse più profondo dell’appartenenza a un medesimo gruppo sociale. I capitanei cittadini ne uscirono vincitori per il proprio appoggio alla civitas: la loro centralità nella lotta contro il Barbarossa li favorì negli anni successivi al trionfo milanese. I capitanei rurali, invece, non solo dovettero abbandonare ogni sogno di autonomia ma subirono il rafforzamento del controllo milanese sull’intera regione. Per quanto riguarda gli aspetti sociali si è iniziato con lo studio della famiglia da Rho, una casata di capitanei urbani ancora poca studiata ma centrale nelle vicende milanesi dell’XI e del XII secolo. In particolare, si sono analizzati gli effetti della posizione politica dei membri della famiglia. Si sono così enfatizzate le chiare differenze rispetto a quel modello feudale che, fino ad oggi, ha delineato le casate capitaneali milanesi; la stirpe ebbe dei profondi legami con la comunità cittadina non solo dal punto di vista politico ma anche economico, rilevando una centralità del mercato urbano nella costruzione del patrimonio familiare. Questa attenzione al sistema cittadino è stata influenzata dai legami con le varie autorità che si alternarono nello spazio politico milanese: infatti, i de Raude riuscirono a rimanere al centro della realtà cittadina grazie alle loro posizioni in seno all’amministrazione urbana. L’appoggio a tutta una serie di coalizioni di successo (turba connexionis Nazarii, Coniuratio, pars Lotharii) permise alla famiglia di rimanere ai vertici del sistema politico dalla fine del XI secolo fino alle guerre contro il Barbarossa. La posizione di primato nella dialettica politica urbana spiegherebbe le caratteristiche univocabilmente urbane della stirpe Un'altra ricostruzione si è incentrata su una famiglia ben più famosa dei da Rho, le cui origini, però, non sono ancora del tutto chiare: i Visconti. L’obiettivo è stato quello di presentare gli effetti di una posizione politica differente. La stirpe, tra le più fedeli al ruolo tradizionale della vassallità vescovile, fece parte di tutta una serie di coalizioni e partes risultate perdenti nella lotta politica milanese tra la metà dell’XI e la metà del XII secolo. L’atteggiamento politico riunì una casata divisa in due stirpi distinte: l’una, i “Visconti minori” assimilabile al paradigma dei de Raude per i loro riferimenti socio-economici strettamente legati al mondo urbano, mentre l’altra, i “Visconti maggiori” presenta un percorso che è una via di mezzo tra la città e il territorio, con gli eredi di Ariprando II con caratteristiche più urbane e gli eredi di Ottone I sempre più interessati alla realtà rurale. Infine, sono stati presi in esame due casi di famiglie rimaste escluse o, comunque, che ebbero un ruolo minore nello spazio politico cittadino. Entrambe le casate avrebbero risposto in modo non adeguato, o almeno non paragonabile alla fortuna delle due stirpi precedenti, alle trasformazioni politiche e all’accentramento del dominio in ambito urbano. I da Baggio per l’eccessiva vicinanza dei propri centri economici alla città in piena espansione, i da Castiglione per la loro distanza dai centri di potere, sia geografica che identitaria. Se il profilo dei da Castiglione rappresenta l’emblema della stirpe di capitanei rurali allontanati dalla comunità urbana dopo la metà dell’XI secolo, più singolare è il caso dei da Baggio che, nello stesso tempo, rappresentavano la casata di capitanei più potente a Milano. Una sciagurata serie di scelte nei conflitti cittadini li portò, in poco più di mezzo secolo, a indebolire il proprio prestigio urbano, così che già alla metà del XII secolo la loro potenza era ormai solo un ricordo. Sul piano politico-istituzionale la realtà milanese tra l’XI e il XII secolo fu caratterizzata da un susseguirsi di regimi di natura urbana. Si ebbe una tendenza di fondo verso una progressiva formalizzazione del sistema che, però, non ebbe un andamento lineare ma fu caratterizzata da una serie di “salti di qualità” nelle capacità di alcuni gruppi di potere di agire nello spazio politico. Questi momenti usualmente coincisero con l’affermazione di un nuovo regime o di nuovi assetti costituzionali. Inoltre, le caratteristiche principali del sistema politico milanese furono tre: la prima è l’alto grado di sperimentazione negli assetti di potere per cui solo verso la metà del XII secolo si affermò una configurazione basata su due istituzioni (consolato e arcivescovato) dopo una lunga fase di instabilità. La seconda è il continuo condizionamento della componente imperiale, che rimase un punto di riferimento, molto spesso ideale, delle élite cittadine. La terza è la pluralità dello spazio politico; non solo come pluralità di soggetti attivi nelle dinamiche cittadine - anche nei regimi più istituzionali - ma anche di interazione tra spazi politici. Infatti, per ricostruire la storia politica milanese si deve considerare che i suoi attori furono inseriti in un intreccio di vari quadri di riferimento (città, diocesi, regione, Regnum Italiae). Si è infine considerata l’importanza nei cambiamenti di regime delle lotte politiche tra schieramenti che caratterizzarono la città per tutto il nostro secolo, mostrando la relazione strettissima tra il peso delle coalizioni e il cambiamento degli assetti di potere. Sul piano sociale l’eterogeneità dei profili evidenzia le differenti possibilità aperte dai cambiamenti nella società milanese. La disgregazione del sistema pubblico non avrebbe indebolito il ruolo economico della città, come avvenne nella Toscana settentrionale, poiché la ricchezza di Milano non era legata ai funzionari del Regno. Le possibilità concesse dal rimanere in città furono sfruttate da alcune casate per potenziare la propria posizione nelle gerarchie di potere, legando così i propri destini ai cambiamenti politici ed economici urbani. La varietà di risposte alla disgregazione del dominio pubblico creò una realtà socio-economica complessa, accomunata da una cultura e da un honor familiare affine; le diverse risposte alle dinamiche politiche crearono profili diversi anche nei vertici sociali dell’aristocrazia non più quindi ascrivibili in toto a un modello feudale.

This volume is devoted to one of the major aristocratic lineages of northern Italy in the later middle ages. The Rossi, whose political and social eminence dates back to the communal age, built in the Parmense a powerful lordship, based both on their estates and fortresses and on a vast patronage network spread over the territory and in the town: and the power of the family, though diminished after the crisis in the relations with the Sforza in 1482, was restored on partially different foundations during the Italian Wars. The essays collected in this book explore the complexity of the Rossi "little seignorial state", focusing on its internal constitution, on its exterior relations and on its artistic and cultural features between the mid-fourteenth and the early sixteenth century.

This monograph provides an in-depth comparison of lay and religious sources produced in Siena (1260-1330) on criminal justice, conflict and violence. Two main trends have been highlighted in the development of criminal justice in late medieval Italy. Firstly, that the practice of revenge was still popular among members of all social classes. Secondly, that crime was increasingly perceived as a public matter that needed to be dealt with by the government, and not by private citizens. These two aspects are partly contradictory, and the extent to which these models reflect the reality of communal justice is still open to debate. The book sheds light on this question through the contribution of religious sources, which scholars have started comparing only very recently to secular ones with regard to these topics. The underlying argument is that religious people were an effective pressure group with regards to criminal justice, thanks both to the literary works they produced and their direct intervention in political affairs, and their contributions have not received the attention they deserve. It is suggested that the dichotomy between theories and practices of ‘private justice’ (e.g. revenge) and of ‘public justice’ (trials) should be substituted by a framework in which three models, or discourses, of criminal justice are recognised as present in late medieval Italian communes: in addition to the trends described above, also a specifically religious approach to criminal justice based on penitential spirituality should be recognised as an influence on the policies of the communes. This case study shows that, although the models were competing, they also influenced each other; and none of them managed, in this period, to eliminate the others, but they coexisted.

Secular law remained largely customary and uncodified in east central Europe. While much of south-eastern Europe had remained Christian ever since Roman times, most of east central Europe was Christianized during the high Middle Ages. The Baltic region came later, Lithuania only being converted after 1387. South-eastern Europe was influenced first by Byzantine and then Italian law. In much of east central Europe secular law was based on Slavic customs, later influenced by canon law and German law. The Sachsenspiegel, Schwabenspiegel, and German town law spread to the whole region alongside the German colonization of east central Europe. Towns functioned as conduits of German and learned law. Certain territorial rulers actively promoted Roman law and (partial) codification, while the local nobility preferred uncodified customary law. In addition to foreign university studies, the fourteenth-century universities of Prague and Krakow, cathedral chapters, and notaries helped disseminate the ius commune into the region.

For more than a century, scholars have believed that Italian humanism was predominantly ‘civic’ in outlook. Often serving in communal government, fourteenth-century humanists like Albertino Mussato and Coluccio Salutati are said to have derived from their reading of the Latin classics a rhetoric of republican liberty that was opposed to the ‘tyranny’ of neighbouring signori and of the German emperors. In this groundbreaking study, Alexander Lee challenges this long-held belief. From the death of Frederick II in 1250 to the failure of Rupert of the Palatinate’s ill-fated expedition in 1402, Lee argues, the humanists nurtured a consistent and powerful affection for the Holy Roman Empire. Though this was articulated in a variety of different ways, it was nevertheless driven more by political conviction than by cultural concerns. Surrounded by endless conflict—both within and between city states—the humanists eagerly embraced the Empire as the surest guarantee of peace and liberty, and lost no opportunity to invoke its protection. Indeed, as Lee shows, the most ardent appeals to imperial authority were made not by ‘signorial’ humanists, but by humanists in the service of communal regimes. The first comprehensive, synoptic study of humanistic ideas of Empire in the period c.1250–1402, this volume offers a radically new interpretation of fourteenth-century political thought, and raises wide-ranging questions about the foundations of modern constitutional ideas. As such, it is essential reading not just for students of Renaissance Italy and the history of political thought, but for all those interested in understanding the origins of liberty.

Chapter six traces the reform efforts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which eventually led to the consolidation of small independent hospitals into large civic institutions that became increasingly medicalized. Health boards created after the Black Death led to secularization of health care and poor relief. These social service institutions evolved over the early decades of the century and were a gradual response to the evolving needs and challenges of the population and the end of the communal era. This unification and institutionalization of civic oriented hospital care, resulted in one large Ospedale Maggiore, which was duplicated in towns and cities throughout Italy in the mid fifteenth century. It signified the end of the small, independent hospital movement that had so transformed the landscape of urban society earlier in the Middle Ages. The process of centralization that swept hospitals up in its wake was a universal feature of Italian state-formation in the age of the Renaissance

Between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries several issues led jurists to rethink the international legal order established in the Roman Empire and the Early Middle Ages. The first was the need to update the list of the law of nations legitimate subjects after the birth of the commune that had not been accounted for in Roman-law sources. The second was to recreate a superior and universally shared set of ‘public’ law rules for international relations to counteract the tendency of communal and monarchical governments to consider the law inter gentes as a form of internal law. In order to address this issue Bartolus of Sassoferrato adapted the Roman category of ius gentium to the features of the medieval geopolitical context. Other topics focused on defining the enemy, freedom of peoples, and treaties among unequal subjects, while the theory of ius gentium of Alberico Gentili was fully rooted in the medieval and early modern legal tradition.

Since the end of the 19th century, Italian historiography concerning the beginnings of the ‘comune’ has identified the expression ante ecclesia in convento, from chapter 343 of the Lombard Edict of Rothari, as evidence of an early medieval communal organisation based on earlier Roman structures. This interpretation is of significance not only for the history of cities, but also for the countryside and the organisation of commons. This chapter explores the function of churches and their surroundings as places of assembly, analysing other Italian written sources that mention meetings of a non-ecclesiastical character in relation to these buildings, and introduces the archaeological evidence to identify where exactly these meetings could have been conducted

This chapter provides a critical mapping of Italian commons, investigating the conceptualisation of property on both traditional commons (agricultural common land) and new commons (commoning projects and practices fighting neoliberal policies and laws). The key aim is to understand how traditional and new commons define and re-define property through law, customary practices and social movements and if there are similarities or differences between the two. Although both traditional and new commons attempt to transcend the public-state/private-individual dichotomy in property law and are permeated by a sustainability ethos, the differences between traditional commons and new commons are conspicuous, rendering impossible the transfer of legal concepts from one category to the other. Such differences relate to the substantive and procedural property rights of the actors involved and to their relationship with constitutional principles.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of lay saints. Between the twelfth and early fourteenth centuries, in the independent citizen-governed communes of Italy, numerous civic cults dedicated to contemporary laymen and laywomen appeared. Joining long-established cults for early Christian martyrs and holy bishops were new cults dedicated to midwives, goldsmiths, domestic servants, and merchants. These new cults promoted the idea that it was these laymen and laywomen who had lived model Christian lives and personified civic ideals. Although only one lay saint from the Italian communes would be canonized by the Roman church in the Middle Ages, the vitae, miracle collections, civic statutes, tombs, and altars dedicated to pious men and women provide convincing evidence that their cults were of great local importance. This book argues that the phenomenon of contemporary lay civic sanctity had a meaning and significance that went well beyond the confines of particular Italian cities. Moreover, it contends that the rise of lay sanctity in the Italian communes illuminates a complex debate that was taking place between the laity, the church, and civic authorities over the source of religious power and charisma.

Philip James Jones (1921–2006), a Fellow of the British Academy, was one of the most distinguished, complex, and challenging of medieval historians. His works on the Italian city-states of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries and on Italy's agrarian history are monuments built to last, benchmarks that defined the field for a generation. Jones was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1984 and was awarded the Serena Medal for Italian studies in 1988. He won a major open scholarship in Modern History at Wadham College, University of Oxford. Jones took a First in Modern History in 1945 and was appointed to a research studentship (Senior Demyship) at Magdalen College. He had also secured a temporary teaching post at Glasgow University. All Jones's previous works flowed into the 700 pages of his mammoth book Italian City-State: from Commune to Signoria.

The essay aims to describe the characteristics of the documents drawn up by notaries in the early middle ages and the role they played to enlight the way they mediated between their communities and new born autorities of the communes during XIth and XIIth centuries. In fact, in italian towns their role as officials who ensured the authenticity of the documents made them leaders in social, economic and political life: Rolandino Passeggeri is a shining example.