Chronicles of the Tumult of the Ciompi (review)

Reviews 165 had its origins in an indigenous oral tradition ('The decadence of feudal m y t h — towards a theory of Riddarasaga and Romance' in Structure and meaning in Old Norse Literature: New approaches to textual analysis and literary criticism, ed. John Lindow, Odense, 1986, pp. 415-54). Curiously, Kalinke frames her study with references to Jane Austen's observation that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife, suggesting that this might have served as a motto for the writers of bridal-quest romance in medieval Iceland (pp. 1, 210). But the niceties of this allusion are flouted by many of the figures in the bridal-quest romances, particularly in the sagas of the maiden kings: those misogamous women who were sole rulers of kingdoms and who often insisted on being called king and not queen. Their suitors, as Kalinke observes (p. 81 ff.), are in want of a meykongr as wife for the very reason of her fortune (and her power), which they will gain on subjugating her through maniage. Their unwelcome attention is met with various forms of humiliating punishment including being whipped, having then heads shaved and taned, and being thrown into a pit of poisonous snakes and toads, courting practices that do not find ready parallel in the genteel culture of nineteenth century rural England. The cunents of sexual politics and societal anxieties expressed by the medieval Icelandic bridal-quest romance run deep indeed and in time these extraordinary texts will no doubt be the subject of closer cultural study. Kalinke has opened the way for those studies by providing an important resource for English-speaking scholars and students. The volume is well presented, with very few typographical enors. I noted the spelling 'Skirni' on p. 14 and 'Congres' on p. 11, both in footnotes. It includes a detailed bibliography and index with a comprehensive list of motifs. Passages from the Icelandic texts are translated, but quotations from German sources are not Judy Quinn Department of English University of Sydney Kantor, Rosemary and Louis Green, eds, Chronicles of the Tumult of the Ciompi (Monash publications in history, No. 7), Melbourne, Monash University Department of History, 1990; paper; pp. 101; R.R.P. AUS$11.50. This volume contains English translations offivecontemporary accounts of the Tumult of the Ciompi: the 1378 uprising of the workers in the Florentine wool industry, the sector of the economy that provided the livelihood of one third of the city's inhabitants. The translations are accompanied by Louis Green's brief introduction which places the revolt in its European, Florentine and historiographical contexts. 166 Reviews The events and the stages of the uprising have long attracted the interest of historians. The tumult is one of the few occasions in pre-modern Europe when the disenfranchized and dispossessed did succeed in overthrowing established government and in instigating a regime where they held a share in power. While the Tumult of the Ciompi was but one of a number of working-class revolts which occuned in Western Europe in the late fourteenth century, in Florence for a brief period of six weeks, the wool workers, the popolo minuto, or as they styled themselves, the popolo di Dio, controlled Florence and wrote themselves into the constitution. Historians have long debated the causes, course and significance of the revolt not only because of the problems of evidence but also because of the ideological commitments that come into play. Thus the Tumult has been portrayed at one extreme as therisingof a class conscious proletariat to overthrow the prevailing economic and social order and at another as no more than a typical Florentine imbroglio in which the atomized workers played different and conflicting roles. The regime of the Ciompi was ruthlessly crashed not only on the day but also in memory. Documents emanating from the Ciompi are virtually nonexistent and the official historians of the Republic villified the workers and then goals and actions. While the five chronicles included in this volume differ in their viewpoints and sympathies on the various stages of the Tumult, all but one condemn the Ciompi. The exception, an anonymous chronicle, appears as...