[SCA-BMDL] TMR 06.02.17, Milner, ed., At the Margins (Beattie) (fwd)

Fri Feb 17 09:53:37 EST 2006

Another book that may be of interest to folks.

Odriana

"Do not dismiss the dish saying that it is just, simply food. The blessed thing is an entire civilization in itself!"
- Abdulhak Sinasi

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Date: Fri, 17 Feb 2006 09:43:41 -0500
From: The Medieval Review <tmr-l at wmich.edu>
To: tmr-l at wmich.edu
Subject: TMR 06.02.17, Milner, ed., At the Margins (Beattie)

Milner, Stephen J., ed. At the Margins. Minority Groups in Premodern
Italy. Medieval Cultures, 39. Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 2005. Pp. x, 283. $24.95. ISBN 0-8166-3821-7.

    Reviewed by Blake Beattie
         University of Louisville
         blake.beattie at louisville.edu

This recent addition to the rapidly expanding body of scholarship on
marginal and excluded groups in medieval and early modern Europe
contains thirteen articles by twelve different scholars (with two by
the editor, Stephen Milner). The articles, all by well-regarded
scholars, are of a uniformly high quality; each one ventures into some
aspect of social and cultural history that has received too little
attention in traditional scholarship, and each one stands on its own
as a scholarly endeavor. Taken as a whole, the collection is, like so
many works in the field, both fascinating and a bit frustrating. If
the book consistently and persuasively demonstrates the essential
interplay between "centers" and "margins," it never really solves the
historical (or historiographical) problem of defining them. Nor does
it stray too often from the traditional great "centers" of late
medieval and early modern Italy; in view of the subject matter, it is
ironic, perhaps, that most of the articles concern themselves with
Florence and, to a lesser extent, Venice. Even so, this is a book well
worth reading.

The book is divided into four parts. Part I, "The Centrality of
Margins," attempts to provide the essential context for the rest of
the book by establishing the importance of "margins" in defining and
affirming "the center." Herein lies one of the collection's principal
problems: one cannot examine "the margins" without clearly
establishing "the center"--and, as the three articles in this section
clearly acknowledge, that is a very difficult thing to do, especially
where the Renaissance is concerned. (Indeed, the concept of
"Renaissance" is itself so hotly disputed that Milner has chosen,
quite wisely, to speak of "premodern" Italy instead.) The articles--by
Milner, Derek Duncan, and Peter Burke--do an excellent job of
reviewing the historiography, underscoring the difficulty in making
clear distinctions between the center and margins, and pointing up the
importance of the latter in delineating the former. Burke in
particular does yeoman's service in tracing the geographic, thematic,
and social "decentering" of the Renaissance over the past thirty years
or so. Still, the reader reaches the end of Part I without a clear
sense of exactly what "the center" is. Is it, as Burckhardt suggested,
"the Renaissance Man," as epitomized by Leon Battista Alberti--a
brilliant polymath of aristocratic lineage yet illegitimate birth? If
so, "the center" would have been restricted to a tiny group of people.
Milner, of course, thinks not (and acknowledges that Burckhardt
himself was open to the alternatives); along with Duncan and Burke, he
is more concerned, perhaps, with describing the near impossibility of
coming up with a clear identification of "the center." One can
appreciate the intellectual honesty of this approach, which refuses to
create artificial norms or to set up straw men. Nevertheless, it does
create something of a conceptual problem for the work as a whole: if
"the center" remains a moving target, itself informed by a constant
and ever-changing dialogue with "the margins," then just how marginal
are the various groups discussed, and on what exactly is their
marginality predicated? The reader must, in a sense, take the authors'
and the editor's word for it that they are.

Parts II through IV explore different groups who existed or acted on
the social margins of later medieval and early modern Italian society;
in the process, they demonstrate just how broad the margins could be.
Some of the subjects can clearly be regarded as marginal, even in the
absence of a well-delineated center; like art and pornography, they
may be hard to define, but one knows them when one sees them. Kenneth
Stow offers up an article, based on his continuing research into
medieval Jewry, on Jews in early modern Italy. Michael Rocke examines
the problem of sodomy in late medieval and early modern Florence. In
both cases, the subjects clearly lie at or beyond the margins. The
Jews were the eternal outsiders within, whose stubborn adherence to
their ancestral faith both precluded membership in Christian societies
and illuminated, as Stow observes, what Renaissance Christians
"questioned or disliked in their own actions" (72). Sodomites placed
themselves beyond the margins of respectable society through sexual
practices that constituted a gross affront to prevailing sexual norms
(though, as Rocke observes, premodern sodomites did not constitute a
discrete sexual class, analogous to modern "gays"; they "were defined
not by the biological sex of their erotic partner but strictly by the
sexual acts they performed," p. 56). Philip Gavitt's article on female
foundlings and charitable institutions in sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century northern Italy looks at the experience of children who were
cast out of their families (most often as a result of material
exigency); significantly, many of these girls turned to prostitution,
and thus continued to live "marginal" lives, when they reached
adolescence and left the protective environs of the foundling
hospitals where they were raised. Stephen Milner examines political
exiles--a group that had marginality thrust upon it and formalized, in
effect, by the rhetorical expressions and ritual activities of the
state. Other articles look at groups that consciously and deliberately
embraced a marginalization which the larger communities viewed as a
wholesome corrective to the worldliness and materialism of urban
society. It is here, perhaps, that the reader gets the clearest sense
of the extent of the center's dependence on the margins. Mary Laven's
piece on nuns in Counter-Reformation Venice reminds us that the
tremendous influence of cloistered women was in large part contingent
on their self-imposed social exile from the communities in which they
lived. In this light, Anabel Thomas' article on the printing press of
the Tertiary Dominican sisters of San Jacopo di Ripoli in late
fifteenth-century Florence offers up valuable insights into the
activities of a marginal group with a central place in the larger
society.

Jews, sodomites, cast-off children, prostitutes, slaves (the subject
of an article by Steven Epstein, reminding us of the persistence of
that venerable and durable Mediterranean institution into early modern
times): all of these clearly stood at or beyond the margins of
society. Even religious women can be seen as marginal, though they
achieved their marginality by means which contemporary society
regarded as legitimate and admirable. Other groups, however, are
rather more difficult to place at the margins in the absence of a
well-defined center; one might even go so far as to say that their
marginality was altogether more marginal. Indeed, these groups
highlight the difficulty in making clear distinctions between margins
and centers. Judith Bryce examines the distribution of devotional
books to reconsider the phenomenon and extent of female literacy in
fifteenth-century Florence. Samuel Cohn revisits the Apennine
communities of rural Tuscany and the changing vicissitudes of their
relations with Florence; Dennis Romano investigates old age and
poverty in Renaissance Venice. Each author makes a compelling case for
the marginality of the group in question, while simultaneously
stressing its constant movement toward and away from the elusive
center. A category as large and internally variegated as "women," for
example, might justly be seen as precluding all but the most general
observations; certainly, women cannot be considered a "minority group"
(despite the book's subtitle), though literate women can. Bryce's
subjects for the most part inhabited the middling or upper strata of
urban Florentine society, and would have evinced a very different
experience from their counterparts in the lower orders or the
contado. Cohn's "mountaineers" had at least an ephemeral place
among the Florentine contadini, until heavy Florentine taxation
and the ravages of war with Milan devastated their communities and
reduced them to the poverty and backwardness for which they became
almost proverbial in the fifteenth century; their marginalization was
thus a product of changes in Florentine policy (the deleterious
effects of which were well known to Florentine policy-makers).
Romano's subjects, of course, were pushed to the margins by the
inexorable progress of time. In a society that placed great emphasis
on youth and vitality, the elderly were often seen as objects of pity,
reduced to poverty by physical debility and forced to seek support
from charitable foundations. Even so, as Romano acknowledges, the
elderly were not a monolithic group; their experience varied widely in
accordance with professional activity and, of course, social status.
In each case, the reader confronts the essential fluidity of a concept
like "marginality"; it pressed upon, and receded from, the "center"
almost constantly. But the reader is never entirely liberated from the
suspicion that the "center" in question is at least as much a
historiographical construction as it is a historical one, determined
above all by the quantity of ink which historians have traditionally
spilled on it.

Wide-ranging subject-matter is one of the pleasures of this book;
readability is another. At a time when social historians have too
enthusiastically embraced the jargon of the critical theorists, and
given the variety of contributors to the collection, this is both
surprising and welcome. Of course, there is a fair amount of
"situating," "decentering" and "negotiating"; one cannot get too far
without tripping over "liminality" or stumbling through short
stretches of "contested space," and there is (to this reviewer's
taste, at any rate) altogether too much "discourse" (both "hegemonic"
and otherwise). The earlier pieces, which address themselves to
theoretical and conceptual matters, are a bit more susceptible to
jargon-mongering than the later ones; but none of the articles is so
given over to it as to be impenetrable. As a whole, this collection
proves that good social and cultural history does not hide its light
under a bushel of hyper-specialized, pseudo-technical gobbledygook.
At the Margins presents a fine collection of compelling and
exceptionally well-researched articles on groups or activities that
have attracted less scholarly attention than they deserve. It leaves
the reader with a richer, fuller sense of premodern Italian society
and the diversity of groups that comprised it; and it is hard to
gainsay the merits of a work that does that.