Sociability and its Discontents: Civil Society, Social Capital, and their Alternatives in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (review)

Sociability and its Discontents is the first volume in the Brepols series Early European Research, which intends to include works that examine how key elements of late medieval and Early Modern European society can shape and challenge modern Western societies. The contributors to this volume examine critically the extent to which contemporary notions of civil society and social capital - key concepts in Western democratic societies according to the American sociologist Robert Putnam - owe their origins to the political systems and ideologies of the independent city-state republics of Northern Italy during the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

The volume takes as its key point of reference Robert Putnam's study of Italian regional governments during the 1970s, Making Democracy Work (1993). Chapter 5 of that study argues that the reason the Northern regions of Italy at the time had strong social and political institutions with an active, engaged and co-operative citizenry - evidence of a robust civil society equipped with much social capital - was because Northern Italian regions had a tradition of republican forms of government that fostered strong social and political institutions, while the South of Italy, which had monarchical roots, was socially and politically dysfunctional. The contributors to the volume engage with Putnam's overall thesis critically, with some reference to his more popular book Bowling Alone (2000), which focuses on the supposed decline since the 1960s in America of sociability, reciprocity, co-operation and trust in people outside the family. However, as the editors of the volume argue, their goal is not simply to engage with Putnam's thesis but also to use his ideas 'as the spur to further analysis of how social capital and civil society functioned in the Renaissance and early modern periods' (p. 8).

Not unsurprisingly, most of the contributors to this volume are historians of late medieval and Renaissance Italy, though medieval England is the subject of one study (Scott), as are sixteenth-century Ghent in Belgium (Van Bruaene) and eighteenth-century Paris (Garrioch). The collection begins with four essays that focus on how civil and social disorder can indeed foster social capital and civil society. To Putnam, rebellion, legal disputes, scandal and vertical patron-client relationships were all inimical to social capital, as they seemed to foster division and disunity. However, as the essays in this section demonstrate, the opposite often held true.

The second section on 'Networks in Operation', re-frames Putnam's analysis of medieval and Renaissance Italy by analysing distinct social networks in Florence and Rome. This is underpinned by an understanding of Italian social relationships informed by many studies that have emphasized the significance of kin, friends and neighbours, as well as the importance of the relationships within and between communities of interest, such as the artisan and religious communities discussed by Nicholas Eckstein and Hugh Hudson.

Putnam's idealized view of the family as an institution which constantly provided mutual support to its members, creating 'thick trust', is strongly disputed in Caroline Castiglione's study of Anna Colonna Barberini's struggle with her marital family, in seventeenth-century Rome, to be recognized as part of that family. Castiglione argues that Putnam ignores gender and the fact that the patrimonial structure of Italian families could make life very, very difficult for the women who married into them, even if their capacity to act as 'weak ties' between families could work to extend the networks of both families.

The next section 'Unexpected Civility' consists of four studies which challenge Putnam's key assertion that Southern Italy lacked both social capital and civil society because of its monarchical, feudal and despotic structures. The essays are historiographical rather than empirical in focus and convincingly demonstrate that Southern Italy had both social capital and civil...