This is the fourth volume to come out of the major three-year PRIN research project “La mobilità sociale nel medioevo italiano (secoli XII–XV)” led by Sandro Carocci and Isabella Lazzarini, which mapped the phenomena of social mobility in medieval Italy. Divided into four strands across four universities, the project examined vectors of social mobility from culture (including work and professions), political institutions, the church, and economic development. This volume's economic focus reflects the overall division of the study.
The majority of the essays explore the theme in a variety of Tuscan settings (eight out of the eleven essays); two deal with Northern Italy (the March of Treviso and Lombardy); and one with Flanders. The team that worked on this volume was predominantly based in Pisa, accounting for the Tuscan focus of the essays. Over half of the contributions are primarily concerned with the Trecento. The first essay, by Simone M. Collavini, explores the forms of movement between countryside and centri minori in rural Tuscany between the twelfth and early thirteenth century. Collavini demonstrates how families and groups experienced social ascendancy from the influence of a commercialization that was not antagonistic to the framework of lordship (signoria) but that, rather, helped actors’ mobility. In the second chapter, Maria Elena Cortese follows the fortunes of the middling aristocracy in the Florentine territory during the period of economic growth between 1150–1250. This group did not decline as signoria enabled families to effectively appropriate peasant surpluses.
Chapters 3 and 4 explore material culture as a way to trace social mobility. Federico Cantini uses archaeological sources—buildings, burial practices, and epigraphy—to shed light on developments in the interaction between social ascendancy and display in strategies of status formation from the eleventh until the thirteenth centuries in Tuscany. Antonino Meo analyzes residential architecture and funerary monuments alongside the consumption of ceramics in Pisa to show how choice was used to communicate and define distinction, evincing patrons’ social ascendancy and new positions in social hierarchies in the Trecento. Paolo Cammarosano's contribution provides a window into the dynamics of Val d'Elsa, a quasi-città near Siena, between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, and shows how growth and social mobility had already stabilized by the early fourteenth century. The commune's social stratification was not a continuum but, rather, stepped, with a large but closed ruling group. Alma Poloni gives a detailed portrait of Pisan commerce and merchants in the fourteenth century. Her essay counters oft-repeated narratives of a city in terminal decline from the late thirteenth century by instead emphasizing complex transformative periods of expansion (ca. 1290–1325 and the last decades of the Trecento) and crisis. Alberto Luongo lays out the dynamics between mobility and economy in the second half of Trecento Arezzo; again, the fourteenth century cannot be reductively captured by an image of downturn for commerce and manufacturing, as illustrated by Luongo's case study of the cloth merchant Simo d'Ubertino.
Two chapters in the volume deal with urban revolts and their bearing on the theme of mobility. Petralia, in a largely historiographic essay, reinterprets the Ciompi revolt as an instance of mobility denied; the popolo minuto eventually experienced social descendance. His sketch stresses the significance of relative deprivation and social ascendancy in Florence. The final chapter of the volume by Jan Dumolyn, Wouter Ryckbosch, and Mathijs Speecke offers a non-Italian perspective from the classic area of comparison, Flanders. It looks at urban revolts with a renewed emphasis on socioeconomic factors (such as demography, economic cycles, and class formation) of popular mobilization that have increasingly been sidelined; fourteenth-century Flemish urban revolts can be fruitfully read by integrating relative living standards and mobility as topics of the medieval city's political discourse. A Northern Italian perspective is represented by Gian Maria Varanini, who in chapter 9 shows that the Trevisan March's major urban centers of Verona, Vicenza, Padua, and Treviso did not experience precocious closures of their ruling groups as oligarchies. Federico Del Tredici focuses on Lombardy in the years following the death of Gian Galeazzo Visconti in 1402. He highlights the interplay between feudal aristocracy, commerce, and finance: the growing role of great financial intermediaries and merchants “appear to be refracted in a series of familiar routes,” albeit with weak collective countenance due to limited horizontal solidarities (323).
Social mobility throughout the volume is understood as the movement of actors and groups within multidimensional social space, where hierarchies are not exclusively economically constructed but dependent on the transformation of status. La mobilità sociale nel Medioevo italiano has made valuable inroads into demonstrating how a dynamic social-mobility approach can be applied to Italian history. Although there are lacunae—for instance, thematically, women as actors and marriage as a vector of mobility are mostly absent; geographically, there is no South—the volume is not intended as a survey. Rather, a great strength of the book is the essays’ expert utilization of archival material, intervening in a crucible of medieval economic historiography, encouraging a broad perspective on the multiplicity of channels and resources involved in processes of social mobility.
