In this Book
- Indispensable immigrants: The wine porters of northern Italy and their saint, 1200–1800
- Book
- 2015
- Published by: Manchester University Press
summary
Indispensable immigrants recreates the world of peasants who streamed into the cities of late medieval and early modern northern Italy to carry crushingly heavy containers of wine. Written in an easily accessible and unassuming style, it is solidly grounded in previously untapped archival and visual sources. In this first-ever reconstruction of the forgotten metier of wine porter, topography plays a key role in forming the labour market; in the scramble to distinguish professionals from manual labourers the term artist gets divorced from lowly artisan, and wretched diet is invoked to explain why workers are so unintelligent; the wine porters make one of their own their patron saint in thirteenth-century Cremona and other interest groups scheme successfully to get him canonised in Rome five centuries later; and when enlightened despots abolish the guilds, the wine porters’ trade fades away just as the candles on their patron’s altars sputter and die out.
Table of Contents
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- List of figures
- pp. viii-x
- I: Alberto
- pp. 9-10
- 1. The legend of Saint Alberto
- pp. 11-20
- 2. The life of Alberto
- pp. 21-22
- 3. The afterlife of Alberto
- pp. 23-32
- II: The wine porters
- pp. 33-34
- 4. The brenta and the brentatori
- pp. 35-63
- 5. Topography and migration
- pp. 64-75
- 6. Porters of the imagination
- pp. 76-100
- III: Sainthood
- pp. 101-102
- 7. Making saints
- pp. 103-114
- 8. Sainthood by community
- pp. 115-142
- 9. Sainthood by the papacy
- pp. 143-169
- Epilogue: Dignity and memory
- pp. 170-183
Additional Information
ISBN
9781526101761
Related ISBN(s)
9780719095221, 9781526101778, 9781526116697
MARC Record
OCLC
964878353
Pages
240
Launched on MUSE
2017-04-14
Language
English
Open Access
No
Copyright
2015