2010/01/01 by David Laven · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Italian Fascism and Post-war Society
paper · doi:10.1057/9780230292505_18
openalex publication_date 2010/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
The nineteenth-century fascination with the medieval is beyond dispute. No other period caught the historical imagination to the same degree. Within this general enthusiasm, Medieval Italy engendered especially intense scholarly – and sometimes less than scholarly – interest amongst both natives of the peninsula and non-Italians. Curiously, one key reason that the history of Italy from the fall of the Western Empire until the fifteenth century generated such appeal was because it was the part of Europe commonly held to have been least penetrated by the medieval: it was in Italy that many of the practices and institutions usually held to characterize the Middle Ages were at their weakest and least durable. Thus, at a time when – according to the orthodoxy of nineteenth-century historiography – the rest of the continent witnessed feudal monarchy triumphant, the key unit of political, cultural, economic and social organization in Italy was the republican city-state. And it was in Italy, too, that the legacy of ancient Rome both lived on most vigorously, and blossomed forth in the civic humanism and the glories of the renaissance. In Italy the medieval assumed a paradoxical status: a powerful sense of republican liberty, the emphasis on civic virtue, a belief in ‘citizen soldiers’ all spoke of continuity with the classical past; but they also hinted at a form of modernity, which arguably disappeared in the aftermath of 1494, when Charles VIII invaded the peninsula, conquering it ‘with a stick of chalk’ and ‘barbarian domination’ began anew. The Italian comuni of the Middle Ages could be seen to prefigure ideas that found voice again in the American and French Revolutions, but which had apparently died out in the peninsula by the sixteenth century (albeit noisily mourned by Machiavelli). It was, therefore, in large part to explain Italian exceptionalism – and apparent decadence and decline – that scholars became so absorbed in the nation’s medieval past, and with the history of the comuni in particular. 1 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.