The Transformation of a Religious Landscape: Medieval Southern Italy, 859–1150 (review)

Valerie Ramseyer has written an excellent and, in many ways, exemplary study of the religious communities of the Principality of Salerno that will be of value to all historians of premodern Christianity. Transformation is a careful analysis of the process of social change and ecclesial reform in Salerno within the context of these same processes in southern Italy in general. The work is divided into two halves. The first considers “the decentralized ecclesiastical system in the Lombard Principality of Salerno up through the mid-eleventh century” (3). The second centers on the abbey of the Holy Trinity in Cava, just north of Salerno, and on the archbishopric of Salerno itself during this period of both Norman ascendance in the region and the so-called Gregorian reforms. These two institutions centralized religious houses around themselves even as private pastoral care and ritual diversity continued throughout the period (1050–1150). Even though southern Italy and the Principality were active participants in the process of reform, “the main force behind ecclesiastical reorganization came from local prelates and clerics with the popes serving more to legitimize and uphold privileges than to create them.” In addition, local customs of clerical marriage and lay-owned religious households were too strong to be eliminated (4). Ramseyer’s rich and effective portrait of the region over a considerable period of time is the fruit of her work in the archives of Cava whose collection of charters and manuscripts extends back to the ninth century. As she notes, this wealth of material has been comparatively little studied, and anyone who has worked in that archive most likely recalls a feeling akin to rubbing their eyes in disbelief. The materials considered are primarily and overwhelmingly the 2500 plus contemporary charters of land holding, tenure, etc.

The title of the work rightly focuses on medieval southern Italy, as the study of Salerno needs to be, and is set within that broader context. This, in turn, points the reader to still larger transformations within the Mediterranean, most notably the shifting dynamic among Greek, Latin, and Arabic speaking powers of which southern Italy is a central and lightly studied part. Our understanding of that process has been overshadowed by the so-called “reconquista” on the Iberian peninsula and northern European participation in the crusading movements. The southern Italian perspective, where Arab and Greek rivalry for power was an observable reality, was quite distinct. Here, crusading ideals and Jerusalem itself necessarily held a secondary place to political rivalry and economic coherence within the Mediterranean (195–196). The resulting portrait is of greater integration (194); for example, monks from Cava appear to have regularly traveled to Mediterranean Africa for trade (182–183), and there was no effort to compel Greek communities to conform to Latin rites, indeed Latin and Greek rites modified one another (154).

Most impressively, Ramseyer captures the nature of premodern ecclesial institutions, especially during the reform period, with their ideals of unity in the presence of a great diversity of practice with an impressive clarity and without reducing those ideals to mere cynicism or diversity to expediency. At first glance, this work might be placed in the larger trend within the historiography of the last thirty years toward close studies of small regions to bring out local detail and add nuance to the sweeping narratives of medieval history. Ramseyer’s study is one of the more rare local studies that, in turn, has clear implications for the broader problem of unity and diversity within premodern institutions. Unity and diversity are the common product of a nexus of social, economic, and intellectual communities; “in the end, ecclesiastical reform in southern Italy was a complex and heterogeneous process that grew out of a web of interested parties, found both inside and outside the region” (113). Therefore, an archbishop such as Alfanus could be an active promoter of reforming ideals without ever prohibiting clerical marriage or enforcing common property...