Medieval Italy: Texts in Translation (review)

This collection of Italian texts in translation positions itself as an undergraduate resource, and is a superb collection of documents arranged chronologically, thematically, and geographically. It is the most recent broad-ranging text of its type since Trevor Dean’s excellent Towns of Italy in the Later Middle Ages (Manchester University Press, 2000) and the editors consciously acknowledge their project as a response and an extension to this work.

Medieval Italy builds on Dean’s work because of its satisfying geographical reach. It is not a collection of texts on Renaissance Florentine (or Milanese or Venetian) elites masquerading as documents about medieval Italians in general: Salerno, Eboli, Palermo, and Corleone are here, for example. If anything, I was surprised that although Florence continues to be well represented, medieval Venice – one of the most important and interesting cities in the region – hardly gets a look-in.

Each thematic section is introduced by the editors and each text by its translator/s. These commentaries are careful and considered, encouraging new readers towards a deeper reading. The index is well suited to students (although proper names cause some problems) and extensive cross-referencing breaks down arbitrary classifications. One of the work’s great strengths is that it pushes no particular barrow: it is not designed for social historians or historians of ideas, but is a universal collection of general interest and use.

Naturally any instructors reading the work will have a list of go-to teaching texts they feel have been neglected. And why should Venice and Milan draw the short straw? Documents by and about women remain problematic, although the section on spirituality (particularly texts on the Florentine beata Umiliana de’ Cerchi) would pique a more engaged student’s interest. I felt a general lack of literary texts too which, in their evocative and almost tangible expression, further approach that elusive ‘sense of the past’. Perhaps this literary dearth is because the editors’ selection ‘has been guided by and reflects the work of Anglophone researchers’ (p. xxi): are there problems of scholarly ‘impermeability’ in the field more generally?

Medieval Italians nevertheless leap out from these pages and force us to encounter them. Giovanni Villani describes the bread baked ‘day and night’ by men and women in a communal bakery set up in Florence during a famine; made ‘without sifting or removing the chaff,’ it is ‘very rough and painful to see and to eat’ (p. 23) and is distributed by food tickets. In a quietly comic everyday drama, Ubaldo of Gubbio goes to remonstrate with council workers and they throw him ‘violently into the liquid cement being prepared’. The saint, ‘totally drenched … humbly silent and with great patience, as if nothing had happened’, returned home (p. 43)! Luca da Panzano enumerates the deaths of his wife and children in usual summary account book fashion, but writes movingly that his wife’s death grieves him ‘as much as if I had died myself’ (p. 454). An Umbrian witch’s incantations animate the heart of a stolid legal transcript: ‘Worm, wormy creature that takes heart and soul, that takes the lungs, that takes the liver, that takes me in the nose, that takes me in the head, that takes me in the feet, that takes every good; Saint Susanna, to the outside send it out; Saint Julitta, to the outside cast it out; Saint Bruna, return to the arse, to the outside cast it out, from one to another, until none remains’ (p. 205). Franco Sacchetti questions in acid tones whether Lucca’s ‘Volto Santo’, a revered wooden crucifix made in Christ’s image, is all it claims: ‘With all due respect, Christ’s was the most beautiful and best proportioned body that ever was, and did not have frighteningly crossed eyes’ (p. 387).

Some help might be appreciated by the undergraduate student confronted with terms such as popolo or ‘magnate’ (weasel words ever and...