Conflict and community in southern England: essays in the social history of rural and urban labour from medieval to modern times (review)

162 Reviews Stapleton, Barry, ed., Conflict and community in southern England: essays in the social history of rural and urban labourfrom medieval to modern times, Stroud and N.Y., Allan Sutton and St Martin's Press, 1992; cloth; pp. xvii, 252; 6 maps, 11 tables; R.R.P. £35.00. Thetitleof this book provides a loose framework for a very diverse collection of essays which differ very considerably in their focus and philosophy. The redirection of interest from government to society has led medieval and early modem historians to put old wine in new bottles, adapting traditional approaches to formal records by an injection of sociology. This is not uniformly successful. Peter Symonds' useful but conventional account of the decline of serfdom infifteenth-centuryWiltshire hardly proves his assertion that it was a form of successful silent resistance of tenant to landlord. Christopher Durston's attempts to bolster an argument linking sporadic evidence of religious nonconformity in Newbury with unorthodox political opinions by reference to modern American sociological research lays no foundations for similarity. George Watts' s objective of disputing the conventionally accepted relationship between the 1381 rising and commercial development is argued anecdotally, piling up examples of resistance over more than a century which vary substantially in type. John Rule is more successful in contributing to the ongoing debate on labour consciousness by analysis of three eighteenth-century industrial disputes in Exeter, as is Bob Bushaway in illustrating the proposition that custom is subject to change and development as it serves as a legally recognized underpinning for the structure of life at village level. Roger Wells provides a useful reminder that all crime is not socially motivated or a form of popular protest, even in the countryside, by demonstrating the urban links of professional criminal gangs operating in early-nineteenth-century Sussex. Mick Reed equally shows that small farmers, who he identifies as peasants, survived in larger numbers in nineteenth-century southern England than is usually assumed while Jeff Porter's contribution reminds us of the important role of fishing in rural poaching. O n the whole, however, the volume is a little disappointing. The contributions are generally slight and sometimes, as is the case with Stapleton's own demographic survey of Odiham, merely reinforce what others have said before. Some are more fashionable than illuminating. Graham Davis's attempt to deconstruct the official view of nineteenth-century Bath slums does not reveal much of the residents' self-perceptions, and Celia Miller's look at hiring agreements in rural Gloucestershire effectively only provides formal documentation of the more compelling vision of Hardy's Wessex. The essays are a reflection of existing pre-occupations with custom, ritual ceremonial, and crime. Painstaking historical detective work puts a little flesh Reviews 163 on to the bones of the inarticulate masses of the past adding to the specific examples available without for the most part offering any new insights or useful methodological breakthroughs. Sybil M . Jack Department of History University of Sydney Starn, Randolph and Loren Partridge, Am of power: three halls of state in Italy, 1300-1600 (The new historicism: studies in cultural poetics, no. 19), Berkeley/Los Angeles/Oxford, University of California Press, 1992; cloth; pp. xi, 374; 8 colour plates, 128figures;R.R.P. US$65.00. In Jacob Burckhardt's portrait of Renaissance Italy, the state became 'a work of art'. As the authors of Arts of power observe correctly, the Swiss historian shied away from the corollary of his own insight that art became a work of state. It is the complex interrelationships, exchanges, and transferences between politics and art, between power and imagination, that provides their theme. Their focus is the decoration of three halls of state in Renaissance Italy: Ambrogio Lorinzetti's frescoes, commonly known as Good and bad government, in the Sala dei Nove in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena; Mantegna's frescoes in the Camera degli Sposi in the ducal palace in Mantua; and Vasari's paintings in the Sala Grande in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. The last are considered in conjunction with the decorations for the state entry into Florence in 1565 of Giovanna of Austria, bride of Francesco de'Medici. The three...