This collection of twelve essays derives from the author's forty-year engagement with the history of the pontifical court in sixteenth-century Rome. It comprises a lively gathering that offers not only a set of helpful studies on topics such as a cardinal's gastronomic predilections and the occupations within his famiglia, but also useful graphs and tables that contribute still more precisely to our picture of a cardinal's Roman circumstances: the number of non-Italians in the famiglia as compared to the percentage of non-Italians in the employ of the popes, the cardinal's finances, and his household's daily consumption of bread, wine, meat, and oil.
Most of these studies have been published elsewhere, with two exceptions: the first, a meditation on the semantics of court and curia into modern times, and the fourth, on the coexistence of cultures — a term that Hurtubise uses in a sociological and anthropological sense — at the pontifical court. The author has, however, reassessed all of the earlier essays, and at least two of them have been substantially revised. This is salutary because, as he acknowledges, since the 1960s when he set out as a doctoral student, the study of Renaissance Rome has come fully into its own, and with the advent of several research initiatives, especially in the 1980s, including the meetings and publications of the Centro Studi “Europa delle Corti,” the scholarship on the Roman court has flourished.
The titles of each essay, suggestive of a general theme, conceal both one of the author's métiers and a unifying thread in the volume, namely the history of the Salviati family. His expertise on the Salviati began with doctoral work on the correspondence in the 1570s of the nuncio, Antonio Maria Salviati, and it led to archival discoveries in Florence, Pisa, and the Vatican, and to an extensive study of the family (Une famille-témoin: les Salviati [Vatican City, 1985]). It is the Salviati, then — the cardinals Giovanni, Bernardo, and Antonio Maria, as well as Jacopo — who are at the heart of this book, and it is their example, closely observed and richly documented, that pervades what he calls the volume's three axes: the court, its composition, function, and evolution; the cardinals’ courts in relation to the papal court, increasingly as its satellites; and, finally, the Roman fortunes of the Salviati themselves from the early Cinquecento onward, and in light of their affinities with Leo X and Clement VII.
The Salviati and their network offer a captivating prism through which to understand the lived experience of churchmen in Rome, and Hurtubise's collected articles should accompany any reading of the scholarship on the social milieu and cultural aspirations of Renaissance clerics, from Von Pastor, Rodocanachi, Chastel, and Delumeau to the recent findings of Italian, North American, and British scholars. Among the essays, his examination of Baldovino del Monte's L'Idea del Prelato (1616) — “Un Art de réussir à la cour de Rome” — might be singled out for its careful reading and thoughtful contextual analysis. His revised version of “Symboles et réalité du pouvoir cardinalice à Rome au XVIe siècle,” originally published in the important collection Simbolo e Realtà della vita urbana nel tardo Medioevo (coedited by Massimo Miglio and Giuseppe Lombardi [1993]), addresses the theoretical framework attending definitions of power, such as Prodi's and Von Ranke's. The author briefly surveys a conceptual landscape here — the symbolism of dress, palace, and insignia — rather than a microhistorical one. In this, and in a number of articles, whether on foreigners, on occupations at court and their hierarchy, or on the career of the able Jacopo Salviati, Hurtubise provides perhaps two main contributions: on the one hand, he gives descriptions and detailed inventories of a set of empirical data — Giovanni Salviati had both a pastry chef and a baker; French-speakers constituted by far the largest group of non-Italians in his household; and of the annual budget at the Palazzo Salviati, 830 scudi a year, or thirty-two percent, was spent on wine — and, on the other, more open-ended speculations about the historiographic resonance yet indeterminacy of the historian's terminology: court, culture, and power. The reader is, I think, attracted and inspired by this tension, which is seen and comprehended all the more clearly for being in evidence across a lifetime of research.
