Miko Flohr's The World of the Fullo is the most extensive treatment of Roman-period fulling in central Italy to date. In this work, F. compiles an impressive corpus of evidence for the industry that is framed within a series of highly relevant and current discussions concerning Roman society and economy.
In the introductory chapter, F. briefly outlines the primary areas to which this work contributes, which bridge both economic and social histories. Perhaps most notable among these are the long-standing primitivist-modernist debate on the Roman economy, and an ancient image of socially and morally deprived Roman working classes. In this chapter, F. also introduces the various types of evidence for Roman fulling and their interpretive limitations, as well as the prime sites under evaluation (Pompeii, Ostia and Rome).
In ch. 2, Flohr describes the social rôle of dress in the Roman world and its impact on market demand for fulling services. Here he raises a key question regarding the composition of markets for his fulleries; tracking the presence of storefronts, scale of facilities and general location in cities and towns, he assesses the demand of private customers versus business contracts for each workshop and outlines what he sees as key differences in market supply.
Ch. 3, ‘The Rational Workshop’, investigates the organization of the fulling process within the built environment of the workshops. Provocatively setting his discussion against a maximum efficiency model derived from Industrial Revolution concepts of division of labour, technology of equipment and design of the workshop, F. considers the types and scales of investment, organization of space and managerial-level concerns regarding resource use, maintenance and workshop growth. Based on these factors, he identifies three workshop size classes exhibiting different levels of efficiency, with the largest class operating according to a ‘remarkably modern’ organizational structure (180).
Ch. 4, ‘Fulling and the Urban Environment’, considers the implications that working (and in some cases, living) in the fulleries might have had for social relations both within and beyond the workshop walls. F. classifies three organizational types (tabernae, atrium-styled workshops and industrial establishments), which reappear in subsequent chapters. Analysing these classes according to the environmental effects of their operations (that is, unpleasant smells, waste disposal) and the visibility of workshop activities within the public space, he interprets fulling activities in relation to the wider urban community, as well as the costs and benefits (that is, water resources, price of land or rent, traffic) of different urban locations.
Loosely adopting a social networks perspective, F. in the fifth chapter approaches the fulleries in terms that he describes as ‘communicative landscapes’ (249). Examining where different tasks were performed, he considers possible social networks within the workplace based on audibility and visibility. He then attempts to differentiate work tasks in the fulling process based on the dirtiness of the job, responsibility for risk, contact with customers and visibility to the street in order to establish internal hierarchies among workers.
The final chapter considers how the three types of fulleries related to their local communities. This chapter also challenges popular views on the relationship between fullers and wider Roman society, specifically confronting the image of disreputability promoted by certain ancient textual sources. F. rightly argues here that not only were professional fullers important members of local society, but also (as highlighted by the use of job title in commemorating the dead and in posting political messages, shared ritual iconography and the formation of collegia) that fullers promoted a shared professional identity. This chapter is followed by a short epilogue briefly summarizing F.'s view on the conceptual relationship between society and economy derived from this work, and contextualizing his study of fulleries within the long-standing primitivist-modernist debate in Roman economic history.
The World of the Fullo presents an important contribution to several growing areas of workshop studies in the Roman world. Perhaps most notably, by focusing on workshop-scale economic organization, F.'s ‘microhistories’ highlight the diversity of workshop types present within a single industry in central Italy during this period, and these workshop types demonstrate significantly different relations among workers and with their wider communities. Such diversity has often been overlooked in larger-scale studies of economy. Undeniably, this work both proposes and addresses an essential set of questions. At times, however, the arguments feel slightly repetitive, and tend more towards the descriptive than the strictly analytical. This is particularly the case in chs 3 and 5, in which individual workshops are described in elaborate detail; such sections perhaps could be abridged through the use of figures or quantitative analyses that would better illustrate and substantiate the line of argumentation.
Furthermore, while the workshop examples used in this study largely derive from excavations conducted long before contextual analyses of small finds and material culture studies became common, one wonders how the results of this work might have been enriched by artefactual evidence from the workshops under evaluation. Tools and small finds from workshop sites of other industries have in many cases proven to be extremely informative for reconstructing daily work routines in ways that are not always accessible through infrastructural studies alone. This is certainly no criticism of the present work, but rather attests to the impressive effort made by F. in the face of limited data.
