Both family history and political history continue to retain their prominence among historians of Italy, and Il Corpo della città: Politica e parentela a Torino nel tardo Medioevo is a recent and worthy contribution to both. In this concise and well-written study by an emerging historian, Marta Gravela reconstructs the kinship groups of the conciliar elites of late medieval Torino and outlines the practices they used to maintain economic and political power. Economic influence was one of the keys to political participation, and in Torino, as elsewhere, the elites began changing their inheritance practices to keep the patrimony intact. This shift included the movement from a more corporate model of partible inheritance toward the practice of primogeniture, which favored single lineages. Gravela argues that these shifts ultimately led to the weakening of Torinese kinships and resulted in their political decline. Thus, paradoxically, the very inheritance strategies the Torinese elite used to consolidate their power also contributed to their demise. The identification of this process is one of the book's main contributions.

The author uses a range of sources to reconstruct the demographics and political structures of Torino in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and begins the work with a useful methodological overview and discussion. This is particularly helpful as the work interweaves two parallel lines of inquiry—the study of the state and the study of the family. Gravela draws evidence from an impressive range of sources—municipal records, episcopal records, and state records, including wills, town council minutes, census records, civic statutes, and court cases. Nuancing ideas of kinship group versus family, Gravela addresses the terminology and the conceptual framework used by family historians and anthropologists. This proves useful when looking at inheritance patterns as a component of family strategies, and the author provides a typology of inheritance between the spectrum of partible and nonpartible. These patterns are also illustrated by residential patterns, which Gravela depicts with useful maps and tables. This is contextualized nicely in the anglophone, French, and Italian historiography of the family, and the chapter would be particularly useful to a wider audience interested in European inheritance patterns and could provide much-needed comparisons with Italian practices.

As noted, inheritance patterns were often about power. In order to demonstrate this relationship, the author presents several case studies of politically influential families that moved toward the model of nonpartible inheritance to maintain their status and keep the patrimony intact. While nonpartible inheritance strategies could initially consolidate political influence, they were also risky. This strategy often worked during the course of one or two generations, but could easily lead to the extinction of the lineage, as several of the cases attest. Alternatively, other politically prominent kinship groups simply lost their political influence as various branches of the family consolidated their resources into one line, and they were either dispersed or subject to changes in fortune due to a lack of cohesion. Conflicts among heirs were both symptoms and results of these changes from the horizontal to vertical model of inheritance. And by the sixteenth century, the Torinese elite no longer looked the same. While this was partly due to the influx of a new bureaucratic class of elites and recent arrivals, the strategies of the former elites only hastened their demise. It should be noted that this is an important and interesting argument that would have benefited from a bit more contextualization within political history and comparison with various Italian states.

On the whole, the book is exceptionally clear and well written; it is concise and easy to read, and it draws upon a wide range of sources. While scholars often study the political changes inherent in state formation separately from shifts in inheritance patterns, Gravela looks at how these processes worked in tandem. Doing so offers a fuller and more coherent picture of the impact of familial strategies on the formation of the state. The author has given us a detailed, nuanced book that will be of use to both historians of the family and political historians—two groups whose objects of inquiry don't always overlap.