Patrons and Adversaries: Nobles and Villagers in Italian Politics, 1640-1760 / Edition 1

by Caroline Castiglione

Overview

The early modern Roman countryside was a site of contestation between great aristocratic families and an expanding papal political regime. Rarely has the role of the inhabitants of this landscape—the villagers—been considered as part of that power struggle.
As Caroline Castiglione shows in this compelling revisionist work, one Roman aristocratic family, the Barberini, was not squeezed out of governing by the extension of the papal bureaucracy, but rather became increasingly engaged with it during the long eighteenth century. Through their participation in the rural commune, villagers in an extensive territory belonging to the Barberini became active participants in the governing of the countryside. Villagers cultivated and exploited interference from the aristocratic family and the papal government, but they also kept urban elites at bay, defending their rights through the strategies of adversarial literacy. Such literate practices drew on village mastery of local constitutions, debates in the village assembly, and brilliant use of the legal system of the papacy to thwart the designs of the Barberini. Later villagers created and interpreted sources for themselves, effectively challenging the elite monopoly on making and interpreting texts.
A lost world of increasingly savvy villagers, irate nobles, and exasperated bureaucrats emerges here in an engaging narrative that chronicles how seemingly marginalized villagers challenged the pragmatic control of the Roman countryside, using texts and ideas that urban elites had exported to the countryside for other purposes.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195173871
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	01/27/2005
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	9.10(w) x 6.10(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

University of Texas at Austin

Editorial Reviews

"An extremely valuable and stimulating work that sheds light on the political world of the countryside and invites us to reevaluate the role of the villagers in the eventual collapse of the seigneurial system and in the formation process of the centralized state."—Journal of Modern Italian Studies

"Castiglione analyzes rural society as a vibrant, politically-engaged world riven by legal disputation and even grass-roots organization aimed at preserving traditional rights against the pretensions and privileges claimed by lords and heirs. Ongoing debates in the disciplines of history, anthropology, political science, and sociology will find a rich, rewarding profile of peasant society and culture in the Roman Campagna."—John A. Marino, University of California, San Diego

"Patrons and Adversaries offers a singular combination of skillful narration, which makes it a delight to read, and analytical precision, which transforms how one might understand state-building in the early modern period. This is one of the most important books in early modern political history in more than a decade."—Edward Muir, Northwestern University

From the Publisher