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  • Garrisoning the Borderlands of Medieval Siena. Sant’Angelo in Colle: Frontier Castle under the Government of the Nine (1287–1355)
  • James A. White
Anabel Thomas, Garrisoning the Borderlands of Medieval Siena. Sant’Angelo in Colle: Frontier Castle under the Government of the Nine (1287–1355) (Surrey, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company 2011) 422 pp.

In her latest monograph, Anabel Thomas provides a comprehensive analysis of Sant’Angelo in Colle during its period as a commune subject to the city of Siena. She recognizes that studies often overlook the importance of Sant’Angelo in Colle, instead giving precedence to the neighboring settlement of Montalcino, conquered by Siena in 1361. Her account seeks to fill this historiographic void through an examination of Sant’Angelo’s people, their possessions and use of land, and their patterns of piety.

For evidence, Thomas relies most heavily on two sources from the early fourteenth century, a 1318 boundary document for Sant’Angelo in Colle and the 1320 Tavole delle possessioni (tables of possessions) for the commune. She [End Page 292] adeptly uses these sources to reconstruct the wealth and land holdings of several people in Sant’Angelo, both those native to the commune and Sienese “outsiders” who possessed property there. She additionally uses reports from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as well as maps from later centuries to reconstruct the fabric of the commune and its use of space.

The first part of Thomas’s monograph is devoted to a detailed analysis of the commune itself; she examines the placement of churches, public wells and olive presses, and civic buildings. Having established the layout of Sant’Angelo in Colle, Thomas then moves into an exploration of its people. By using the boundary document and the Tavola delle possessioni, she is able to establish possible familial relationships and to discern the patrimonies of the commune’s richest men and women. When addressing the poorest inhabitants of Sant’Angelo and those who seemed to have no living quarters, she makes the argument that contrary to the prevailing scholarly view, a form of sharecropping existed in the Tuscan commune during the early fourteenth century. An analysis of several specific cases buttresses her claims. Thomas closes her monograph with an extended discussion of the surviving artwork from the fourteenth century, concentrating on the church of San Michele Arcangelo. Here, she uses her expertise in art history to trace the provenance of the church’s frescos and altarpieces, with an eye toward establishing patterns of piety in Sant’Angelo in Colle.

Thomas has done a fine job of reconstructing the commune of Sant’Angelo in Colle during its period as a Sienese frontier settlement. She uses her source material admirably, teasing out the specifics of individual people and their use of land and space. Her discussion of the artwork in San Michele and the piety of wealthy patrons in Sant’Angelo is particularly illuminating. Additionally, she achieves her goal of emphasizing the importance of Sant’Angelo in respect to Siena and Montalcino. Indeed, she finds that although the subject communes were political adversaries, they were “in reality closely linked through family and other connections” (387). Her conclusions, however, remain isolated. Thomas does not attempt to locate her study in the larger context of medieval Tuscany, and apart from her discussion of sharecropping, she does not indicate in what ways Sant’Angelo in Colle might be representative of other Italian communes. Although she uses evidence from nearby Montalcino to help understand life in Sant’Angelo, the two settlements remain largely separated in her monograph. The same is true for Siena. Thomas frequently refers to the city walls and barracks constructed by the Sienese government in Sant’Angelo, and she discusses the presence of some wealthy Sienese citizens in the subject commune; however, there is no real sense of how conquest affected the lives of people living in Sant’Angelo. Ultimately, Thomas’s Garrisoning the Borderlands of Medieval Siena provides a close, if isolated, analysis of Sant’Angelo in Colle. She has done much to illuminate life in the commune, using her source material to its fullest extent. Broader implications of her study, however, are left for the reader...

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