Cola di Rienzo e il comune di Roma (review)

These two volumes offer a sociolegal study of late medieval Rome, set around the revolution of Cola di Rienzo in 1347. The events are well-known, but their meaning remains contested. Rehberg therefore focuses on social interpretations, while Modigliani traces the constitutional implications of Rienzo's buono stato. The works demonstrate both the strengths and limits of these methodologies.

Rehberg's contributions to Roman studies are largely prosopographical. Here he focuses more explicitly on sociology: clientage, and secondarily on faction. His approach is firmly revisionist. Where students of the political and cultural history of Rome have long accepted the threefold construction of Gregorovius and Boüard — a dynamic, often realigning struggle among the papacy, barons, and commune — Rehberg insists that a study of clientage dissolves these distinctions amid the deep structural affinities of Rome's great families and their clients in the city and district. Despite Rome's use as Bartolo da Sassoferrato's "monstrous regime" of factionalism, Rehberg stresses that faction also paled in the face of clientage networks. His thesis thus offers a valuable corrective to long-accepted methods of viewing Trecento Rome.

Rehberg is on firm ground in offering granular analysis of the patterns of family power and influence permeating all levels of society and factional ideologies. While his many studies have made excellent use of major church and baronial archives, as Roman historians have long recognized, meaningful quantification is impossible for Rienzo's Rome. The essential archival records — notarial protocol books — are missing for precisely the period under study and only become available again in the 1360s. We are thus, as Rehberg admits, left with narrative sources to document patterns of lay clientage.

Rehberg therefore turns to Villani, the Chronicon Estense, and especially the Anonimo romano's reportage on Rome. Like many historians of Cola's Rome, he mines the isolated mentions in these and other narratives for detailed information about families, their interconnections, patterns of patronage, positions, careers, and political alliance. Rienzo's letters — high exemplars of self-construction and mythmaking — are also enlisted as solid evidence. Rehberg takes these materials at face value: as accurate and explicit records of Trecento reality.

Though he makes passing reference to Gustav Seibt's fundamental study of the Anonimo romano (1992), his analysis seems little influenced by this work. Nor does Rehberg seem mindful of a large body of other critical deconstruction of precisely the type of narrative representations he deems essential. As Philippe Buc cautions (Dangers of Ritual) and as Seibt has demonstrated, these sources are not sociological field notes, but highly artistic constructs serving as much literary as historical ends. The Anonimo romano's exploration of the motivations of Rienzo and his opponents, of baronial or popular allegiances, Cola's inner attitudes toward them and their consequences — so important to Rehberg's analysis — owe less to realities of faction or clientage or to any deep social and economic structures than to literary genre and classical precedent in Livy, Sallust, or Lucan, for example. One cannot approach them with what Chantal Thomas has called a "naiveté," a confusion in Barthes's terms between "language" and "natural fact." Hayden White's tropes may be more at work here than Durkheim's or Weber's structures.

Of all medieval cities Rome is the least open to quantitative analysis. It was the city of myth by definition, and explicitly excluding this symbolic reality has important consequences. In his conclusions Rehberg repeats the standard sociological trope that clientage "neutralizes" class war (150). He then asks that if — as he indicates he has just proven — class war was not the central motif of Rienzo's revolution, what then was "revolutionary" about Cola...