New Approaches to Naples c. 1500–c. 1800: The Power of Place ed. by Melissa Calaresu and Helen Hills (review)

The editors of this well-organised volume of collected essays, Melissa Calaresu and Helen Mills, inform the reader that the thrust and purpose of their volume is ‘to challenge and interpret both the glamorization of Naples as excessive, dangerous and exotic, and its related scholarly neglect’ (p. 1). If there ever were a place that warranted challenging new approaches to address scholarly neglect and its unique cultural and political paradoxes, that place must surely be Naples whose dual kingdoms were coveted particularly by generations of culturally diverse sovereigns and would-be princes in their questing dreams for monopoly over a bespoke Mediterranean empire.

As a political historian of the second house of Anjou and its dealings with the late medieval crown of Aragon–Catalonia, I found John A. Marino’s essay, ‘Myths of Modernity and Myths of the City’ of particular interest. Marino analyses, with considerable insight and a freshness of prose, the marginalisation of southern Italy and redresses, in no small measure, the ‘undeservedly patchy presence’ occupied by Naples in general surveys of Italian cities.

In the premodern era, Naples was a space of immeasurable geopolitical import and prestige but now languishes largely forgotten, at least in the minds of non-specialist historians across the disciplines. Marino states that he has ‘evoked the haunting image of the contested crowns, caskets and conquests in this well-known chronology [of the various battles for Naples] … to highlight the complex exchange and interaction between the Italian north and south, and between the Italian states and their neighbouring states in Spain, France and Germany’ (p. 13). He rejects viewing these actions and events ‘from a vantage point of a single state or a single national tradition’ (p. 13) and seeks instead to integrate them into a single unified history. With this essay he succeeds admirably: it lives up to its promises with the added bonus of enriching the understanding of the reader.

While many of the contributors’ essays seek to address the fragmented field of the cultural history of Naples, not all of them live up to their promise and their variety leaves the field no more connected. Rather than resolving it as the volume’s editors set out to do, this mirrors the, sometimes disconnected, nature of current cultural historical research into the Neapolitan ‘enigma’. As is often the case with collected essays, a few of them leave the reader a little unsatisfied, but this is perhaps a harsh judgement upon a collection that will leave readers with much to consider, and enriched in no small measure.