This book is a welcome addition to scholarship on late fourteenth-century Rome. Based on a thorough study of notarial documents, it shows the many ways in which late medieval Roman political and spiritual cultures were closely intertwined. It pushes against the popular view of fourteenth-century Rome as an insignificant agricultural town awaiting its transformation by the return of the papacy. Palmer adds to scholarship that shows Rome during this time (when the popes were based in Avignon in Southern France) to be a vibrant commune, and he argues that it had more in common with other Italian communes than is often assumed. Using various kinds of archival sources, Palmer traces the growth of a new civic elite and its developing ideas about Christian virtue and good governance. He uses this foundation to construct what is in my view a more problematic thesis about the relationships of the Roman communal government and the papacy.

The first two chapters of the book trace the fourteenth-century political and social history of Rome, punctuated by the failed revolution of Cola di Rienzo at midcentury, which led to the transformation of the idea of a free commune and a crisis of legitimacy for the ruling elites. The second chapter delves into the two elite groups of late medieval Rome, the barons and non-baronial civic elites. Palmer rightly insists that private notarial documents, which concern the patrimony of kinship lineages, also have relevance to ideas about just governance in the public arena. He shows that the Roman barons had one foot in the city and one in their extra-urban estates, whereas the new civic elites grounded their authority and status firmly within the city itself and within its various rione or districts. These civic elites articulated a new moral economy characterized by ideas about Christian virtue and good governance.

The book includes a study of all surviving fourteenth-century Roman testaments. They were private but also public. They were written to maintain and forge kinship ties as well as ties in the community within particular neighborhoods. They speak to the close relationships between spiritual economy and personal property. Wills provided for the souls of the deceased (shortening their time in purgatory by means of donations to the living for interventions such as prayers and masses) and for the distribution of goods, including real estate. In a chapter on bequests for private chapels, Palmer shows that baronial chapels displayed the union of secular power and ecclesiastical authority, whereas new civic elites endowed private chapels to show the virtue and rewards of good governance. A chapter on women's houses integrates the lives of women into the spiritual economy of the city, in that pious and virtuous women were considered an essential part of a well-governed city. Palmer then turns to the study of the ways in which violent conflict could be resolved by ritualized peacemaking, in which elite Romans played a central role.

Palmer uses his complex study of fourteenth-century Roman society as a basis to argue that the new Roman civic elites were willing to govern but not to rule, that they gladly ceded sovereignty to the returning papacy (in the person of Boniface IX in the 1390s), and that they became cooperative administrators of papal dictates instead. This view is dependent on Paolo Prodi's thesis of the sovereign papacy. But the popes were often far from sovereign in fact. Nor can most communal magistrates of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries be described accurately as cooperative administrators carrying out the pope's will. Palmer's thesis involves an oversimplification of the complex relationships between the increasingly powerful popes and the still functioning (and often resistant) communal government in these centuries. In sum, this book represents an important addition to scholarship on fourteenth-century Rome, while its concluding thesis contributes to the ongoing debate centered on papal sovereignty and the growth of the papal state.