Communities and Conflicts in the Alps from the Late Middle Ages to Early Modernity ed. by Marco Bellabarba, Hannes Obermair, and Hitomi Sato (review)

Two novelties distinguish this recent collection. They are not methodological, but procedural. First, it has gone global. One of its three editors is Japanese, as are four of the fourteen contributors. Consequently, the other novelty is that its findings, ordinarily presented in Italian and German (as befits the Italo-German Institute where the volume originated), all appear (with assistance from three translators, one of whom is also Japanese) in occasionally opaque European-Union English (the spell-check function preserves several howlers, for example, “week” instead of “weak”).

Thematically, the volume has minimal coherence. Nearly all of the contributors work within the paradigm of “communalism” developed by Blickle and his Swiss student Jon Mathieu.¹ Geographically, communalism undeniably flourished best in Alpine regions; its largest and most durable political successes were the Gray League and the Valais federation. However, this volume imperfectly conceals the geographical boundaries between its mostly regionally based scholars (four from the Italo-German Institute itself, with three others based in Trent or Bolzano, plus Lombardy and Piedmont) and some of its Japanese contributors, who investigate a few widely separated—and far from Alpine—regions of late medieval and early modern Central Europe, stretching from Basel-land to the border between Bohemia and Bavaria.

Readers will encounter a wide variety of late medieval conflicts of various types, mostly involving communes in the southern Alpine valleys under Tyrolean suzerainty. The causes for these recorded disputes range from pasture rights or unjust tolls to a village miller’s dubious measuring (240–244). Several involve friction about ecclesiastical privileges, including the extremely large area required by a Carthusian foundation in the uplands of an Alpine valley (65–71). In one extreme case, the Bishop of Trent pardoned a village in 1492 after its “unruly youths” had lynched their chaplain and burned his corpse; less than two weeks later, the benefice was entrusted to a new priest, who was duly informed of the reason for this sudden vacancy (99–100). By far the most brutal episode is a witch-hunt in a bilingual Alpine valley near Trent. Its most suggestive finding is that twenty of the twenty-eight condemned women had brothers, sons, or husbands who had supported a major 1503 protest against their episcopal captain; bypassing the Bishop of Trent, its spokesmen appealed directly to the emperor at Innsbruck (122–123). Seldom has a widely disliked rural official been capable of wreaking such rapid and devastating revenge!

Unsurprisingly, the most informative chapter comes from Vicenzio Lavenia, the only conference participant based south of Rome. His exemplary survey of witch-hunting across the Italophone southern Alps (151–164) emphasizes the similarities and differences between a first cycle around 1500, led by ecclesiastical witch-hunters based in northern Italy, and a much later cycle in roughly the same zone, led this time by local secular authorities acting outside the control of a now-skeptical Roman Inquisition. Lavenia also gets credit for suggesting a plausible explanation for the mythologized foundation legend of a cenobium near the Tridentine/ Venetian border that had been donated by a noble clan with a remarkable tradition of fraternal hostility (230, n. 27).