A Companion to the Renaissance in Southern Italy (1350–1600)

Italy’s southern half has long been neglected in wider traditions of scholarship for many reasons, not least of which is a series of negative stereotypes and misrepresentations purporting to the region’s cultural and economic backwardness, static political traditions, and marginal importance to wider developments either in Italy or in broader contexts. Specialists in the region have been working against these notions (commonly called the “southern question,” or questione meridionale) for several decades, but these older interpretations persist and thus hamper our understanding of the region’s unique, complex, and important history, particularly in comparative modes. This volume’s specific aim is to approach the problem of general unfamiliarity with the region during the period of the Renaissance, broadly conceived. This was a time when the south—the Mezzogiorno—was united under Italy’s only centralized monarchy, the Kingdom of Naples (at times ruled independently, at times under Aragonese or Spanish control), meaning that its political trajectory was vastly different from the areas to the north of Rome. But this fact does not mean that “the Renaissance” did not happen in the south, or that cultural and literary developments there were divorced from broader European and Mediterranean trends at the time. What it does mean is that there is currently no unified historiography or methodological approach to studying the Renaissance in southern Italy, a gap that the editor and contributors to this volume have sought to correct, but which also makes their project a challenging one.The editor’s strategy in this volume is to piece together a cross-disciplinary, thematic, and multipolar vision of the region in order to begin building a coherent historiography and inspire future research. While Naples was the capital of the kingdom and its most important intellectual center, it is not the primary focus of this volume. Instead, the emphasis is on the many urban and rural networks across peninsular southern Italy (excluding the islands), employing a thematic but not comprehensive approach to the region’s particular ways of intersecting with larger themes in the study of the European Renaissance. In other words, this is neither a holistic narrative of this region’s participation in larger trends connected to the Renaissance nor a final word on any subject. Because of these factors, the volume is useful for those who are new to the study of the Renaissance south or who are seeking a foundation for further study. The chapters, though numerous, are relatively brief and are aimed at the nonspecialist; none of this means that they are light on substance, however, and each is filled with considerable research-based data and analysis. Each chapter is followed by an individual bibliography that highlights the foundational secondary scholarship on the topic, thus making it easy for discrete sections of the volume to be assigned in classrooms or for graduate students. Maps and images appear together at the end of the volume, along with a glossary and a list of the kings and viceroys and their regnal dates.The first section contains six chapters on “The Context,” which lays a groundwork for readers new to the region. The first chapter (Abulafia) situates Aragonese southern Italy in its broader political and economic context in both the Mediterranean and Europe (the introduction provides a brief synopsis of the major political developments to give readers a sense of the complex political transitions that took place across these centuries), while the second chapter (Terenzi) narrows the focus to regional administrative and judicial structures, and their transformations across the Aragonese period. The third chapter (Sakellariou) turns to economic and demographic conditions. This chapter places significant emphasis on the dynamism of agriculture and small towns/villages across the region as well as the region’s participation in local, regional, and long-distance markets. Chapter 4 (Palmieri) places southern Italy in the context of religious movements, conflicts, and Church administration. The fifth chapter (Montuori) details linguistic variety (both spoken and written) between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, again emphasizing a dynamism that goes against the prevailing notions of the region as static and isolated. Finally, chapter 6 (de Divitiis and Lenzo) approaches Renaissance humanism itself with a focus on cultural representations of the region’s ancient past and contemporary landscape.Section 2 comprises six chapters about urban centers and their networks. The first (Senatore) works to define the various types of urban centers outside of Naples, part of the volume’s overall goal of focusing attention beyond the capital city and defining the terms of investigation. Chapter 8 (Vitale) compares specific aspects of various towns: noble residences, community bonds, mobility, and markets. Nine (Storti) delves into another such specific: factionalism and political strife in and between cities. Ten (Abulafia) addresses Jewish and Converso communities and their importance in the region both before and after the expulsions. The final two chapters in the section move to physical infrastructures of southern Italian towns: 11 (Lenzo) focuses on ports, roads, and aqueducts, while 12 (de Divitiis) considers southern architecture within larger Renaissance trends.Sections 3 and 4 home in on the types of cultural production associated with the Renaissance in the rest of Europe. Section 3 covers various types of historical and historiographical writings, some of which participated in broader patterns of Renaissance humanism and others of which were more locally conditioned: historical writing (Delle Donne), writings on political questions (Cappelli), antiquarian writing about cities (Miletti), regionally specific genres that represent orality and spoken vernaculars (De Caprio), and local trends in education and literacy (Senatore). The overall import of these chapters is to demonstrate that literacy was widespread in southern Italy, that writing in many genres flourished at this time, and that authors of administrative and political texts were careful recorders of oral speech patterns and vernaculars, allowing spoken and written language to intersect and interact. In historical and political writing, as in other areas studied within this volume, we get the impression of a dynamic, complex culture in southern Italy in a wide variety of contexts.Section 4 contains seven essays on “Cultural Patterns,” including literature and theater (Vecce), philosophical writings (Giglioni), academies (Iacono), libraries (Abbamonte), manuscripts (D’Urso), painting (Zezza), and music (Fabris). This is the section that most closely tracks the south’s participation in broader trends of Renaissance culture, detailing how intellectual culture grew in importance and prominence from the first half of the fourteenth century in both Naples and other sites. Humanist policies, institutions, associations, and cultural productions were promoted by the kingdom’s rulers and by its clerics, political functionaries, learned courtiers, educators, thinkers, writers, and artists. This section demonstrates the vitality of Renaissance humanism in the south in ways that both overlapped with, and diverged from, models in other parts of Europe. Various authors in this section introduce concepts such as that of a “long Renaissance” (Giglioni, 502) or “another Renaissance” (Vecce, 457) as being most relevant to southern Italy, demonstrating that even within this volume there is no one perspective for analyzing humanist activity or artistic production and patronage in the south or its relationship to that in the rest of “Italy” or the “Italian” language. The combination of detailed case studies and synthetic overviews in this volume, however, all point to the dynamism and complexity of the Italian south, the vibrant and yet disrupted and discontinuous nature of humanist production there, and the polycentric nature of Renaissance culture and society across the region.