At the Margins: Minority Groups in Premodern Italy (review)

The thirteen essays of At the Margins: Minority Groups in Premodern Italy are the outcome of an interdisciplinary collaborative enterprise that began with a small conference organized by the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Bristol. Stephen J. Milner has assembled a strong collection of essays on the processes that identified "societies, groups, and individuals" (3) — such as sodomites, Jews, slaves, nuns, and prostitutes — and the terms that set them apart from others. The book is organized into four sections that address the multifaceted relationships between marginal and central. In the first part the authors use contemporary cultural theory to evaluate and formulate the links between center and margin. In the remaining parts they delve into the practice of culture and the process of identity formation as groups, individuals, and institutions engage in negotiations, accommodations, and conflicts across some of the central Italian Renaissance cities — Florence, Venice, and Rome — covering a chronological span that goes from the fourteenth to the early seventeenth centuries.

In part 1, "The Centrality of Margins," Milner, Derek Duncan, and Peter Burke stake out the methodological and historiographical contexts for the re-maining essays. The three authors present margins and center as ambiguous and contested "porous grey areas" (4). In addition, they point toward the multilayered complexity of identity formation, and they question the uniformity of the Renaissance itself. With the help of postmodernism and cultural studies and by recentering the lost voices of the Renaissance the three authors aim at taking apart the conventional cultural hegemony of Renaissance humanism and hence decenter the Renaissance.

The four essays in part 2, "Negotiating Margins," show the fluid dynamics through which forms of control and domination, and the ambiguities of public space, were created. Focusing on Florence, Michael Rocke and Philip Gavitt trace the interplay between, on one side, the civic magistracy of the Officers of the Night and charitable and government institutions for single women, and on the other, sodomites and prostitutes. Rocke unravels the growing ambivalence toward sodomites by the Florentine government as sodomy became "an increasingly common feature of the public scene and the collective mentality of Florence" (57). In 1502 Florentines abolished the Officers of the Night and diminished penalties against sodomites. In contrast, as the sixteenth century progressed and the possibility of receiving a dowry lottery diminished, wayward and foundling girls found themselves further marginalized by an institutional system that exploited them or abandoned them to their fate. The remaining essays turn to "walled" spaces: ghettos and convents. Kenneth Stow and Mary Laven underline the multisided implications of the establishment of ghettos, founded in the major Italian cities during the sixteenth century, and of enclosed convents, enforced by the Counter-Reformation Church. While intended to isolate and marginalize Jews and women, ghettos and convents, in particular the convent parlatorii, turned into spaces where these groups found the opportunity to resist and challenge restrictions and in the process forge a new sense of community and identity.

Where part 2 of the collection discusses marginality against a historical background set within the centralizing and disciplining policies of the growing Italian regional states and the post-Tridentine Church, part 3, "Marginal Voices," and part 4, "Minority Groups," recover the voices of marginal groups in the texts that they helped produce and illustrate their diversity within urban and rural cultures. In part 3, Judith Bryce, Anabel Thomas, and Stephen Milner explore the extent of women's literacy in Quattrocento Florence, the contribution of religious women to the business activities of the Stamperia di San Jacopo, and late medieval political thought. In this way the three authors recover the "marginal voices" of women and exiles. Diversity is further emphasized in the last three essays, in which Steven Epstein, Samuel Cohn, Jr., and Dennis Romano examine slaves, mountaineers, and the elderly. According to Epstein, the presence of a small group of slaves following the mid-fourteenth century not only...