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Book Review
| David Foote, Lordship, Reform, and the Development of Civil Society in Medieval Italy: The Bishopric of Orvieto, 1100–1250, Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004. Pp. 272. $50.00 cloth (ISBN 0-268-02871-0); $25.00 paper (ISBN 0-268-02872-9).
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| Orvieto is a beautiful town in northern Umbria. In the Middle Ages it was moderately prosperous, standing astride the vital trade route, the Via Francigena. David Foote's intent is to take Orvieto as paradigmatic of developments behind the formation of communal institutions across the twelfth century. |
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What lifts Foote's study beyond the cluster of books that study the rise of the commune is that he resolves not to "banish to the margins" bishops and episcopal institutions. Bishops of Orvieto were not just important figures in the origins of the commune but central actors in the entire process of growth of communal institutions. |
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What makes Foote's book of interest to legal historians is that he takes institutions seriously (not as mere facades for personal power) and treats his sources with respect for their form and provenance. In the changing weight and style of Orvieto's bishops, Foote attempts to trace a growing bureaucratization, most visible in the increasing role of notaries in episcopal administration, as revealed in surviving registers of diocesan records. |
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The characterization of the direction of change "from charisma to bureaucracy" is nothing new, nor is the sense that the disintegration of Carolingian public power from the end of the ninth century left bishops in control in cities, surrounded by rural signorial lordships. Validity of documents no longer rested on the holder of royal authority but on the notary as a source of publica fides; the document was no longer a charta but an instrumentum. Only the diocese remained as a link between city and country, and bishops extended a corporate vision of authority to rural parishes and monasteries for spiritual reasons, against the more material interests of rural lords. Thus the processes of ecclesiastical reform and state building ran together. |
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As the burdens of territorial expansion of its authority to the west provoked financial problems for the bishops, episcopal spiritual authority waned too. Orvieto became home to a community of Cathar heretics, whose ascetic rigor stood in contrast to an episcopal administration mortgaging its properties. Dispute between Orvieto and Innocent III gave vent to anticlerical sentiments that Foote sees as brewing for decades. When the Roman Pietro Parenzo arrived in Orvieto to serve as podestà (the office itself a step to a more sophisticated governing structure), he attempted to prosecute politcal and religious dissenters as heretics. The Passio, written by the later Bishop Giovanni, that details Parenzo's "martyrdom," reveals that the podestà was trying to suppress factional fighting even as he worked with the bishop to quell the Cathar heresy. Murdered by the antipapal faction, Parenzo brought together the interests of commune, diocese, and papacy. |
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Through the same century of Orvietan strife, Roman law had been reborn in schools, mainly Bologna, and some of its language and procedures were finding their way into notarial texts and courts. Still, as Foote notes, there was a deep ambiguity, for the sophisticated language of rights and property did not coincide with an authority capable of implementing them. Yet notaries increasingly penetrated both communal and episcopal administration, and Bishop Giovanni used the register to inventory episcopal property rights and to keep such records in diocesan hands. Another impetus to routinization and bureaucratization came from the rise of the popolo in Orvieto, who also saw records as protective of their rights and interests. |
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Notaries then could act as the vehicles to express a new civic historical consciousness. Foote traces a line of progress from monastic chronicles through episcopal biographies to civic chronicles in various Italian cities. In Orvieto there survives an intermediary text in the historical observations inserted into the episcopal registers by Bishop Ranerio (1228–1248). Foote finds that Ranerio vitally "judged past bishops on their ability to preserve records" (156). Ranerio's comments reveal a frustration with the slow pace of ecclesiastical reform, but mainly from concern that things were being diverted from their intended use. Orvietan spirituality embraced and championed canonization of a local Franciscan, Ambrogio of Massa, who clearly had "ministered to the physical and spiritual needs of the people within the body politic, leaving political matters to communal officials" (183). |
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Foote's book focuses on episcopal affairs, which lie at the heart of the registers that are his main source. The virtue of that focus in unearthing the influence of the bishopric on civic development is also the book's limitation. The secular order of Orvieto is surprisingly little investigated and never really described. Throughout there is a presumption of parallels in developments with other cities, although the details of Orvieto's history also show the working of some forces, notably the direct involvement of several popes, that set the particulars of Orvieto's history on their own trajectory. |
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If, as it seems, what is being explained ultimately is the development of a legally infused civic order, then this book can offer only a very fragmentary, if nonetheless illuminating, perspective. It does not investigate the role of law, courts, procedures, and so much more that formed the center of that order. |
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| Thomas Kuehn
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| Clemson University |
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