The Medieval Salento: Art and Identity in Southern Italy by Linda Safran (review)

The Salento—roughly corresponding to the heel of Italy—was home to a complex, mixed society in the Middle Ages, intertwining Latins and Greeks, Normans and Angevins, Orthodox and Catholic, Western and Eastern Christians, and Jews and Muslims. Safran’s outstanding book is a sophisticated and rich study of the ways in which these groups conveyed identities to themselves and those around them.

The themes of the book are established in the opening chapter, in which Safran sets out the parameters of her study. She develops a nuanced notion of identity—its fluidity and diversity—and how individuals can hold multiple identities at once. Safran brings together many different approaches to this subject, from sociolinguistics and ethnology to cultural anthropology and iconography. In every case, Safran provides clear definitions of her methodologies, assesses their strengths, and acknowledges the critiques and issues that they raise. She is rightly wary of the limitations that modern labels and categories impose upon medieval people whose lives were more varied and complex than cursory depictions can ever imply. She balances proclamations of ethnicity with declarations of social and professional status and balances religious affiliation with gender and linguistic preference.

Given the range of ideas that it incorporates, Safran’s writing is a model of clarity and organization, supported by ample secondary literature, which students and academics will certainly appreciate. Since Safran trained as an art historian, visual and material evidence lies at the heart of her study—primarily wall paintings, sculpture, and epigraphy—but her book is far more than a study in art history. All of her ideas come together in her final chapter, “Theorizing Salentine Identity,” in which she champions cultural process and the importance of histories that are inclusive and multiple rather than individual and discrete. Her critique of the language of cultural contact—singling out the overworked concepts of influence, acculturation, syncretism, and palimpsest—is both passionate and insightful.

The meat of the book comes in two parts—an extensive database that describes and transcribes all of the known images and inscriptions that Safran uses to make her case and a series of chapters that explores the different ways in which identity could be proclaimed, debated, disguised, and changed. Four of these chapters cover topics that arise directly from the material in the database, examining how names, languages, statuses, etc., appeared in texts and images and how people viewed and used them.

Three chapters take a different approach. Rather than working from the evidence of individual texts and monuments, Safran constructs notional medieval lives, fleshing them out through the material evidence. She examines the life cycle from birth to death, as well as the rituals associated with religious and secular life. These chapters allow Safran to consider an extraordinary range of interactions between people and their social and physical environs—where people stood in church or synagogue; how they responded to various spaces and images; and how they expressed themselves in marketplaces, processions, bathhouses, etc. In every case, Safran employs the evidence in her database, always in a nuanced and sophisticated way.

Safran’s strength lies in her ability to examine many diverse groups in a single study, rather than in a series of discrete studies. She gains much by considering the differences between them as well as the similarities within them. She gives women and children as much attention as she does bishops and dukes. A work like this one requires years of research to build up a familiarity with the material evidence, much of it dispersed, relatively unknown, and scarcely available. It also requires a scholar who can grasp the potential of applying multiple approaches to material more usually confined to matters of style and iconography. Safran clearly loves the Salento, and the region is fortunate to have found such a devoted scholar.