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

The Medieval Salento: Art and Identity in Southern Italy is an impressive book. This is made clear immediately by two factors: the database included in the volume—nearly one hundred pages of careful entries of inscriptions and images that speak to Salentine identity, and the introduction, which although quite comprehensively written, asks and answers immediately a number of important methodological questions that less attentive authors would have either glazed over or failed to address. On the very first page, Safran uses her title to launch into this discussion. She writes that the title of the book is “at first glance, an unambiguous and perhaps even uninspiring title” (1). However, as she quickly shows, the words contained within it are not straightforward at all—all of them are ambivalent or difficult to define. Although the topic of the book, southern Italy in the Middle Ages, seems quite simple, Safran gestures to its complexity by asking in her introduction “what is art?” “what is identity?” and “what is the Salento?” Though a somewhat unconventional way of introducing a book, this approach seems highly effective, particularly because Safran is addressing a region characterized by its complexities: the Salento, we learn, is a region in southern Italy (roughly the boot), which has been the home of many groups from diverse origins, as well as linguistic and religious traditions. One of Safran’s innovations in the book is considering them holistically, rather than as discreet units. She writes: “I maintain that our understanding of the Orthodox Christians of the medieval Salento can only be enhanced by looking also at the Roman-rite Christians and the Jews” (14). With regards to the Jews, she admits to a kind of “affirmative action”—a special focus to remediate the lack of scholarly work on them by art historians.

The book is composed of eight thematic chapters, in addition to the introduction, database, and back matter. Consistent with Safran’s desire to look at the region as a whole, rather than specific religious or social groups, she divides the chapters by theme rather than community. As such, the chapters address subjects such as naming, languages, ritual, and Salentine identity. In the first chapter, “Names,” Safran attests to their importance, writing “the most important part of being a recognized individual was, and remains, having a name, and ethnographic studies reveal that even in modern times, a Salentine baby is in a sense not really born until his or her name has been officially recorded” (18). Still though, names were malleable; Safran writes about Jews who adopted vernacular names that were translations or had a tangential relationship to their given names. However, she shows that Jewish males persisted in keeping the practice of Hebrew naming throughout the period, due to the idea that God was monolingual, speaking only Hebrew. For Christians, names reflected a variety of factors: kinship, geography, connection with particular saints, and connection with God. Safran catalogues here the names found in inscriptions for various groups of people, but ultimately her argument for the chapter is simply that names have power, and that the actions both of giving a name and changing one’s own name are meaningful. The mutation of names is a caution that in reality what we can learn from a person’s name is somewhat limited. The second chapter approaches language similarly. Safran poses language as learned and socially determined, and like names, “not a sure indicator of cultural or ethnic background” (38). She examines text in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, as well as bilingualism between any two of the above. Here again, the reader encounters warnings of caution: patrons may have commissioned inscriptions in something other than their native language. Jews were the most frequently bilingual, because they communicated with those both inside and outside of their religious community, but in general the Salento was a region where languages were mixed and exchanged, owing to the numerous ethnic and religious populations gathered there...