Read more
This book sets out a new interpretation of the transformations that affected relations between tenants and landowners throughout the central Middle Ages; offering an innovative perspective on how the change in the forms of land management reflected general transformations of the economy--with particular regard to the rise in overall demand.
List of contents
- Abbreviations
- Units of measurement
- Note on terminology and translation
- Introduction
- 1: Land Management And Rural Society Before And After 1000
- 2: Florence And The Florentine Countryside: Case-Studies (Eleventh- Thirteenth Centuries)
- 3: Lucca And The Lucchesia: Case-Studies (Eleventh-Thirteenth Centuries)
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Lorenzo Tabarrini completed his PhD at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Chris Wickham from 2015 to 2019. Subsequently, he spent a year in Brussels thanks to the financial support of the Wiener-Anspach Foundation, working on the notarial books preserved in the archives of Lucca and dating to the thirteenth century. He is currently a post-doc researcher at the University of Bologna and he is involved in a three-year project on the characteristics and the evolution of the royal landed estates in medieval Italy (from the ninth to the twelfth century).
Summary
This book examines the forms of estate management in the countryside of Florence and Lucca between the eleventh and the middle of the thirteenth centuries. It argues that their change reflects wider transformations of medieval economic patterns, and specifically the surge in overall demand that occurred in the decades bridging the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries.
The reasons for a comparison between the Florentine and the Lucchese countryside lie in the alleged differences of their historical evolution--as it has been outlined by scholars so far. The so-called manorial system (sistema curtense) is believed to have ceased to exist in the Lucchesia around the beginning of the tenth century, whereas in the Fiorentino its disappearance can be dated to the early thirteenth century. Similarly, the Florentine countryside is generally regarded as the birthplace of a particular type of sharecropping regime, the mezzadria poderale, which spread over much of central Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and would later become an essential component of Italian agrarian identity. On the contrary, the mezzadria poderale is thought to have never developed at any point in the history of medieval and early modern Lucchesia--and this was indeed the case with all the coastal areas of Tuscany. The book endeavours to examine the characteristics of estate management in the central Middle Ages in their own right; that is to say, by detaching those transformations from any teleological view, and by placing them within the economic and sociopolitical context of the period 1000-1250.
Additional text
The book, written with a calm and well-reasoned tone which constantly guides the reader throughout the different issues discussed in the volume,...the insights provided by Tabarrini also result of great interest for the study of sharecropping on a general level.
