Kings of the Street: Power, Community, and Ritual in Renaissance Florence by David Rosenthal (review)

Ki+ngs of the Street is a study of the festive brigades’ potenze (powers)—known as kingdoms or states—of artisans and labourers that were part of Florence’s ritual and communal fabric from the late fifteenth until the early seventeenth century. David Rosenthal critiques an existing body of work which views the appearance of these potenze on the urban stage on certain occasions—such as May Day, the feast day of Florence’s patron-saint, St John the Baptist (24 June), or the birth of a Medici heir—as a static safety-valve, an event which reduced the chance of lower-class rebellion and in which the plebeian brigades were merely doing the bidding of their rulers. Rosenthal presents a well-argued and more complex view: these plebeian actors did have agency, both at the time of festivity and beyond it. These potenze aped the rituals of kingship through their performances and both the ruler and the brigades developed relationships and created performances based on shared cultural understandings. It was an alliance, which, while still recognising the primacy of the ruler also allowed agency by the potenze.

The heyday of the potenze was in the sixteenth century. Chapter 1 documents where the forty-five individual associations of male artisans and labourers were congregated. They were found predominately in the working class districts of Florence located on the fringes of each of the city’s four main districts, but, the author argues, they were not cut off from the rest of the city. The potenze were part of their neighbourhoods and parishes and aligned to local confraternities. They could be considered micro-communities centred on street-corners (‘canto all Macine’), open tracts of land near city gates (‘Biliemme’), a parish (‘Nebbia’), or a piazza (‘Città Rossa’). But these potenze could also be trades-based, such as the potenze for dyers and weavers, with the loci of these occupational potenze found in the occupational districts and workshops, which were often outside their neighbourhood districts.

Chapter 2 argues that the Medici used the potenze as an arm of its statecraft to signify the peace created by Medici rule. Nevertheless, the potenze were not merely appropriated by the Medici rulers for their own ends and the relationship was more akin to a contract. These potenze could be used to symbolise an alliance between the Medici and the plebes of Florence, but the plebeian brigades could also be dangerous, particularly if some of the potenze which also acted as jousting brigades, requested of the duke that they be allowed to carry weapons to add to their festive display. Unsurprisingly, these requests were often refused or the brigade members were told to carry fake weapons only.

A stagnant economy and a changing religious environment, the focus of Chapter 3, helps explain why the potenze had begun to decline by the late sixteenth century and no longer existed by the 1650s. The late sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century collapse of the wool industry and the resulting unemployment for its largely male workforce, alongside the rise of a female-dominated silk industry led to profound economic and social change. The Medici rulers, in 1610, fearful of a mobilised, disenchanted, and unemployed working class, stripped the potenze of their banners, which could not be returned for festive occasions without first petitioning the duke. The Catholic reform movement’s emphasis on piety, pilgrimage, and an understanding of Christian doctrine rather than public feasting, jousting, and stone fights also helps to explain how these potenze transformed into charitable organisations and associations for recreation whose members made frequent pilgrimages to the countryside. At least one potenza from the late 1620s, made up of silk weavers who made pilgrimages to shrines outside Florence, was uncharacteristically female. As Rosenthal notes, this potenza and its development deserves more investigation. Could this female potenza’s practice, for example...