Figure di comunità

English summary

Contemporary historians are faced by a series of critical choices: ought they take legally–defined bodies, such as the rural communes investigated here, as their object of analysis, or break them down in order to observe them from within, teasing out the distinct roles played by individuals, families and neighborhoods; ought they consider the community and other social or institutional bodies to be collective agents in history or deconstruct them, viewing them as an open stage on which individuals and groups played out their separate initiatives; should they focus on interpersonal relationships or identities; and, with regard to the latter aspect, should they adopt a weak or a strong concept of identity?
One of the aims of the research presented here is to bring all of these alternatives back into the live debate on the period under study. In attempting to reconstruct the political confrontation of that period in its historical context, we use notarial documents as our source, specifically records of community assemblies, which we analyze not solely as texts but also as graphic productions, that is to say, as documents not only to be read but also to be looked at. For this reason we have chosen to present our work in digital format, providing hyperlinks to reproductions of notarial scripts, a facility that we could not have offered with a printed edition.
It is well–known that, in Europe and from the 12th century onwards in particular, the manuscript page was used to aid readers in conceptualizing and memorizing the contents of the books being written by the new class of intellectuals, chiefly by means of a clearer marking out of the portions of text: the division of the script into chapters, the provision of chapter titles – sometimes written in red ink with decorated initial letters – and paragraph markers all helped to structure the writer’s line of reasoning and underline the key logical connections running through it. Furthermore, numerous scholars have identified a common denominator among the schemata (wheels, trees, ladders and so on) that in the Middle Ages flanked the written text on manuscript pages (such illuminations served to arrange vices and virtues into hierarchies, identify the parts of encyclopedic knowledge, illustrate the propositions making up a syllogism), the painted images and the pictures that aided memorization: all had the common purpose of giving substance to aspects of reality that could not be perceived by the senses, establishing relationships between abstract entities and ordering objects and concepts into taxonomic grids. However, the extent to which notaries too made use of such visual and diagrammatic techniques to organize their thoughts has perhaps not been fully recognized to date. Yet, albeit with different aims and outcomes, the division of texts into portions and the schematic re–arrangement of certain sections (through the use of lists, parentheses and text panels) were of key importance in notarial documents also, serving to illustrate social relationships, hierarchical ties between individuals, group identities and the defining features of local politics.
Similarly, although the advance of the Hindu–Arabic positional numeral system – which reached Italy between the 13th and 14th centuries – is a well–studied phenomenon, little attention has been paid to the encounter between the new book–keeping writing practices and the art of notarial writing. Yet this is an aspect deserving of in–depth analysis, given that those drawing up the notarial scripts must surely have recognized the expressive potential of dividing the page into dedicated spaces or arranging text “in columns”.
The writing models just described were adopted and creatively experimented with on a local basis, leading – throughout the 15th century in particular – to a new and specific tendency on the part of notaries to conceptualize political relationships and social allegiances both on and through the manuscript page. Thus, historians must almost necessarily consult this source in order to explain the changes undergone by the community institutions in terms of both their concrete functioning and the development of the underlying corporate model. Lists of councilors and men (homines), presented in tabular form, served to identify with unprecedented conceptual clarity the various parties (family groupings, contrade or, in the case of the valley “universitates”, communes), establishing their place, within the higher–level unit of the community, representing the latter more as a complex synthesis of many individual components than as an undifferentiated whole, and illustrating the forms of coordination and political mediation practiced in the larger rural federations that had managed to free themselves from urban rule.
In short, the notaries put their technical knowledge at the disposal of the communities that engaged them, thereby contributing to the development of local thinking with regard to the crucial aspects of organized society: the defining characteristics of social classes and groups based on blood ties, co–residence, gender or age; the relationship between these groupings, the individual and society as a whole; the public recognition due to an individual’s reputation with his neighbors; the degree of compromise that could be advantageously and feasibly established between the juridically–defined institutional units and the segments of society making them up. Analysis of the political culture of the day, contextualized in time and space, shows the impressive intellectual effort that animated even a peripheral area of Renaissance Italy: rural upper Lombardy, where the sources examined here were produced. It also reveals how some of the phenomena that historiographers have long believed to play a central role in the political transformation of the Italian peninsula towards the end of the Middle Ages (the increasingly clear recognition of social position, the rise of the corporate model within urban and rural communes) were accompanied by broad debate in the course of which practically every hamlet and village saw the formulation and subsequent refinement of innovative and locally specific proposals, as well as lively differences of opinion and changes of mind, all of which the notaries – amongst others – observed, expressed and persuasively put forward in graphic form in their documents.

Translation: Clare O’Sullivan

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