A social history – or the history of society – is concerned mainly with the interrelationships of individuals with each other, and the factors that affected these interrelationships. These factors include the physical environment, the political, legal and institutional frameworks, agreed roles of behaviour, conventions and accepted ways of behaving, languages and other means of communication. There are different kinds of grouping of individuals: family and household, hamlet and city, work-places, guilds, confraternities, religious houses and so on. Social inter-relationships may be seen in terms of conceptual belonging or exclusion: nobility, ‘order’, class, rich and poor, clerical and lay, national groups. A general history like this can suggest to readers an abundant choice of ways of looking at society, and can include both wide-angle and microscope lenses. Readers then can follow their own inclinations and interests.
Social history has to be selective, by topic and geographical area. Each issue cannot be generalised and illustrated for all of the Italian peninsula, but my discourse should suggest some similarities and contrasts geographically. Current historical knowledge, understanding and perceptions – and my own biases – mean that more will be exemplified from north-central Italy than from the south, though the latter should have its share of attention in discussion of the rural scenes or household and kinship relations. In choosing examples, and highlighting certain historians’ work, I have tried to represent different approaches and biases of other historians – in favour of ‘mentalities’ (more aptly the French mentalités), feminism, social anthropology, physical determinism, microhistory and so forth. Readers may well detect that chapters speak with different dialects. The authorial voice has many tones, including discords and dissonance. When not trying to convey others’ approaches, I have favoured socio-religious matters rather than supposedly quantifiable economic dimensions. Social history concerns all in society, not just the lower orders and class warfare. I have tried to give a due share to women’s history, but integrated into the whole, and not segregated into a separate chapter. The works of Fernand Braudel, and of historians working around the French periodical Annales: histoire, sciences sociales, have had their impact – when dealing with physical environment, structures, mentalités, but not when over-emphasising statistics, or excessively discounting the importance of events and individual actors. Other aspects seem influenced by Natalie Zemon Davis’s work and approaches (though on France rather than Italy), on social groupings, popular religion and the importance of festivals and rites of violence; though I do not share her past Marxist and class-struggle interests.1 I use works of art as evidence alongside written documents conventionally utilised by historians, though word limitations have curtailed sections that might have used them more, and have prevented discussion of problems of ‘reading’ the different kinds of evidence.
I am writing primarily for the English-speaking world, not the Italian (though I am mindful of the possibilities of an Italian version), in anticipation of a student and beginner audience (including that mythical beast, the General Reader). I also want to help professional academic readers with expertise elsewhere who want some guidance on early modern Italy, whether their primary interests are post-unification Italy, other parts of early modern Europe or the wider world. But I also consider Italian specialists – whether historians of certain cities and regions, or experts in art history, literature, music, political theory – who want some guidance about other areas, whether geographical or topical (while they can either challenge or educate me from their expertise). Italianist friends and contacts (as particularly at some recent transatlantic conferences) have encouraged me to consider them as well.
This last readership factor has added to the complications of bibliography, reference notes, language and detailed exemplification. The literature on virtually all I have covered is potentially large. Constraints of space mean that I have only been able to use a fraction, and to cite even less. I have included some archival references for the benefit of specialist colleagues.
Detailed examples have been used to arouse interest or to illustrate how a social situation worked (or failed), not to prove a generalisation. Some choices are of the unusual rather than the supposedly typical; but such examples should stress the complexities of social history, and probe simple generalisations; since many long examples cannot be paraded, I have tried to use some that cross-reference with a number of issues in different chapters, so that in the end they may illustrate both normal and abnormal situations.
The Italian university systems and archival organisation (state or ecclesiastical) encourage a concentration of research and writing on a regional basis. Given that the Italian peninsula has contributed more to Western history and culture than any other area (consistently from the Villanovans and Etruscans, through the Romans, the establishment of Western Christendom to the present), and has more surviving evidence on which to research, it is understandable that history writing remains regional. Italians are reluctant to produce Italian-wide studies, general histories or syntheses involving different areas, and they have mixed feelings about foreigners venturing to do so. If Italian history is to be written then it should be by teams of local specialists; hence the huge volumes in the multi-volume series published by the Einaudi and UTET presses are splendid in many ways, but lack overall clarity and synthesis. Leading cities and provinces produce vast multi-volume, many-authored volumes. A large thriving periodical literature is long on detailed information, short on analysis and synthesis. A foreigner working from abroad to produce overviews has much to master, with little intermediary help.
Anyone compiling a bibliography on all or part of early modern England or Scotland has a number of single-author and single-volume works to both help them and pit their wits against. For Italy I have little to build on, or compete against. There is one single-volume coverage of Italy in my period, helpful but somewhat dated – in French, by J. Delumeau (1974). There is a valuable modern single-volume study in Italian, using many eminent authors who do attempt Italian-wide syntheses for their areas: G. Greco and M. Rosa (eds) (1996), with Paolo Malanima covering the economy, and his friend Franco Angiolini, La società. In English the Longman series covers the early modern period in four volumes, with six authors: D. Hay and J. Law (1989), E. Cochrane (1988b), D. Sella (1997), D. Carpanetto and G. Ricuperati (1987). Each has merits, but there is no meeting of minds or series coherence. Here I offer one mind and authorial voice, if discoursed in various dialects!
In covering from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, I emphasise the central period from the late fifteenth to later seventeenth centuries. A suitable conclusion point for an ‘early modern’ period is the 1760s, when a number of states under the impact of enlightenment ideas and dire famine undertook serious attempts at reform of the old society. Arguably out of the intellectual debates and writings of the 1760s, and subsequent practical campaigns to reform inter-state trade, taxation policies, feudalism, legal procedures and punishments, agricultural production and so on, came sufficient changes that the foundations of modern Italian society and ideas were laid. So the 1760s–90s belong as much to the nineteenth century as to the early modern period, but several examples will be drawn from these late decades.
A suitable starting point is less clear. While it is tempting to accept 1494 – with the invasion of Italy by a large French army under King Charles VIII – as an often-used conventional breakpoint in Italian history, it has drawbacks for the social-history commentator. Many ideas, attitudes and procedures were developed in the course of the fifteenth century which need to be discussed with those of the post-1494 period: attitudes towards education, civility, the role of women, the uses of wealth, domestic living and conspicuous consumption, the relationship of the individual and the group and so forth. There is a more practical historiographical reason, connected with a precise historical development, for fully incorporating the fifteenth century into the chronology. In 1427 the Florentine government created a new register of its citizens’ and subjects’ possessions, the catasto, in order to have a more efficient and extensive foundation for taxation! It was a tribute to Florence’s bureaucratic efficiency, and in some ways to the city’s republican civility. The catasto records survived (and caused imitations – of lesser quality – in Tuscany and elsewhere, some of which also survive), and they have been the foundations of many studies in our century, including an early computer-based analysis in 1978 by the late David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber. Studies which started with this catasto record have moved on to wider investigations through the fifteenth century, bringing in other documentation such as wills, personal or family diaries and memorials (ricordanze) and notarial contracts. Many aspects of Italian social history have received illumination from the Florentine archival base of the fifteenth century – population structures, family composition, wealth distribution and the position of women, children and servants. Some exemplification will thus come from that period.
1 See notably her collected essays (1975) and her articles of 1974, 1977, 1981; and interview with her in H. Abelove and others (eds) (1983). For most of its history before 1993 the Annales periodical was subtitled Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations.