Sleepwalking into a New World: The Emergence of Italian City Communes in the Twelfth Century by Chris Wickham (review)

The appearance of autonomous medieval urban collectivities with popularly elected rulers is often hailed, especially by Italians and Americans, as a precocious manifestation of modern republicanism and associated with the pursuit of liberty. Wickham’s account of the communes, exemplary of the historian’s craft in both its strengths and limitations, renounces ideologically driven hindsight and resists conflating action and intention. Aware of the otherness of the past and armed with a rare combination of common sense, erudition, and imagination, Wickham emphasizes the momentous nature of the communes’ abandonment of traditional hierarchies of government but asks, “Why would we assume that they had a clear and consistent idea of what they were doing, . . . [recognizing] that this was The Future?” His follow-up question, however (“What did they think they were doing?”), is arguably not answerable from the scant evidence surviving from this remote era—and there is a tension between Wickham’s “short answer” (“we do not know and will never know except very partially indeed”) and the vision evoked by the book’s title. As a master of his field, Wickham has the confidence and honesty throughout his analysis of Milan, Pisa, and Rome, his major case studies, to acknowledge complexity at the expense of driving home his argument. So, despite the clarity of his prose, leavened by droll humor as he notes, for instance, the importance to Milanese self-representation of surnames related to shit, as well as Wickham’s balancing of the relative influence of various “economic strata,” of innovation versus continuity, with constant qualifications, the general reader might wonder after all what to take away from this intriguing study. Its conclusion, that the communes’ leaders “did not know what they were doing or, to the extent that they did, were cloaking their actions, even to themselves, in imagery which belonged to other political systems” is not entirely convincing, though refreshing in its novelty.