city and community
Oldfield, Paul. <i>City and Community in Norman Italy</i>. Series:
Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought: Fourth Series, 72.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. 310. $99.00.
ISBN-13: 9780521898041.
Reviewed by Louis I. Hamilton
Drew University
lhamilto@drew.edu
Paul Oldfield's <i>City and Community</i> contains a wealth of detail
from the lives of the cities of primarily Apulia and Campagna in the
eleventh and twelfth centuries. The five-page bibliography of primary
sources in printed editions not only reveals the breadth of his survey
of the material but also makes this work an invaluable resource for
all scholars and students of medieval Italy. Such a concentrated
survey of urban life in southern Italy is a unique and difficult
undertaking, and most welcome. <i>City and Community</i> comes out of
Oldfield's thesis as will be apparent to the reader. The wealth of
material that Oldfield collects is both the strength and great
weakness of the work as Oldfield's broader analytic point and overall
thesis is too often lost in loosely organized details. This work will
ultimately, I believe, prove an important starting point for future
research on urban life in Norman Italy.
Oldfield is concerned to demonstrate that, despite an entrenched
historiography that has long since marginalized the cities of southern
Italy, the cities of Norman Italy developed and retained elements of
independence, self-governing, and civic identity. Oldfield is correct
to challenge the portrait of southern Italy as "more a passive object
than actor in history," as Giovanni Tobacco once described it (5). In
this traditional portrait, urban creativity and liberty were crushed
by church and state alike. Oldfield offers much evidence that reveals
the cities of southern Italy as anything but passive and oppressed.
It should be noted that the title is <i>City and Community</i>, not
"city and commune." The latter is a concession to the limited
authority of the citizens of southern Italy. Oldfield defines
communal as "an adjective meaning 'that which relates to or benefits
the community.' It is not to be associated with the commune as an
institution unless this is specifically indicated" (7). Such a
definition obviously begs the questions, what is "the community," who
defines what "benefits" it, and how and by whom was that benefit
attained? In this definition, a royal privilege granted to a monastic
community, a bishop's household, a guild, or a group of self-described
citizens are all equally "communal" actions. A more limiting, but
traditional definition of the commune as a sworn association formed
with the purpose of governing public activity within urban areas would
have loaned greater clarity to Oldfield's work. It would have also
allowed more ready comparison with urban transformations on the rest
of the Italian peninsula. Nor was it necessary for Oldfield to invent
such a distinction as he offers evidence of sworn associations
(societies, for ex.) exerting independent authority within the city.
In addition, he repeatedly discovers the traditional actors of the
communes (<i>boni homines, iudices, cives</i>, etc.) acting with
common interests, even if without direct evidence for a sworn
association. A more traditional definition would not only have been
more precise but would have enabled greater integration of the two
historiographies of medieval Italy. The equally thorny question of
what defines a city is dealt with in the more typical manner, albeit
imprecise, of confining the study to the self-described
<i>civitas</i>.
The first part of the work, "Urban Government and Communal
Independence," provides a chronological overview of the effects, or
lack thereof, of the Normans on the urban centers of southern Italy.
The first chapter, "Before 1085: the arrival of the Normans," is
filled with tantalizing clues of a vibrant urban life in the eleventh
century. One wishes that the <i>cives, boni homines</i>, or
<i>iudices</i> (23, 25) that Oldfield has discovered in his research
or the uprising against ducal control that he thinks "may be evident
of incipient communal participation in civic affairs" were more
closely scrutinized in their details. This book is filled with such
clues that will surely become the basis of future research. Chapter
two highlights the absence of Ducal presence in cities like Troia and
Bari. In Bari in particular the Byzantine elite appeared to have
retained their titles through the eleventh century. The situation in
the cities became more fraught in the early twelfth century with
Benevento and Capua asserting greater independence from the Norman
dukes and Bari, Gaeta, Trani and Troia following suit more or less.
Bari, Gaeta and Trani appear to have experienced the greatest
independence although the organization of the chapter requires the
reader to construct the comparisons with some difficulty. Here, at
least, Oldfield is using the more traditional phrase "communal
institutions." Chapter three contends that the years of civil war
from 1127-39 did not result in an abandonment of civic privileges but
reveals much greater continuity with the privileges gained in the
preceding two generations than had been previously thought. This
relative, and surprising, independence continued on the mainland
through the early thirteenth century.
Part two of the book, "Urban society: community identity and wealth,"
largely attempts to survey social identity within the cities and is
less successful. Intriguingly, Oldfield notes that the term
<i>cives</i> is increasingly popular in the twelfth century and that
it denotes greater social status although it admittedly cannot be
precisely defined (180). He mentions in passing a greater emphasis on
civic rights at the expense of civic custom with little effort made to
explain what seems a remarkable observation (182). A close
examination of the context of that evidence might have enabled greater
causal explanation. As is often the case, one wishes that Oldfield
could have presented the reader with a range of examples of the use of
the term so that the reader could either better understand his
reluctance to impose precision or understand the spectrum of possible
meanings he has discovered. Chapter seven, "The Community," is
perhaps the least satisfying in the entire work, but again tantalizing
clues abound. His argument that the distinction between the (ill-
defined) categories of "elites," "middle" and the "edges" of society
is imprecise, is unsurprising. Still, we are treated to a wealth of
detail; the neighborhoods of different cities are sprinkled throughout
the chapter (198-202 for example) and would repay revisiting and
reorganizing by individual city. If it matters that the tanners were
located outside of the cities, then it would matter where outside a
given city they were located as it might tell us something about the
status of the community they were near. Physical proximity may or may
not reveal interconnectedness but it is certainly worth knowing to the
extent possible. A social map does not, but could emerge from these
pages. Saracen slaves are briefly considered but the Jewish community
gets closer discussion here as well (206-15). Chapter eight on the
bishop is brief but reveals the interconnectedness of episcopal
household and civic identity. The final chapter on the economy is an
interesting sketch of the extent and limits of urban trade
organization and Mediterranean-wide exchange drawn from a range of
sources, from pilgrimage accounts to privileges and charters.
Oldfield has brought together a wide range of evidence and materials
that reveal the complexity of urban life in Norman southern Italy. In
doing so, he has achieved the objective he set for the work. This
work will be useful to future scholars interested in both precise
portraits of individual cities and reintegrating the urban history of
medieval Italy.
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