Political Culture in Seventeenth-Century Italian Villages.

A half-century of scholarship focused on peasant up-risings in early modern Europe has tended to characterize most of those movements as conservative or lacking in political ideology, since they did not demand the overthrow of the entire social order. So far as historians are concerned, the political ideas of rural Europeans often begin and end with their participation in such rebellions. Outside those cataclysmic moments, peasant politics, conservative or radical, fade from view. By these standards, most of contemporary Western Europe and the United States are also devoid of politics. [1]

A few scholars have proposed that we recognize the political content of a broader range of peasant behaviors, including griping, stealing, and petition writing, to name only a few. Te Brake has asserted that we should conceptualize politics as "an ongoing bargaining process between those who claim governmental authority ... and those over whom that authority is said to extend," a definition that calls for a reassessment of peasant demands during ordinary times as well as during rebellion. This article focuses on village politics in early modern Italy, where rural unrest was relatively rare, and where its absence has often been explained by the peasants' hopelessly low status vis-a-vis cities and lords. In his recent synthesis of the historiography of early modern Italian peasants, Epstein hypothesizes that "the unusually low incidence of rural rebellions in Italy may have been the result of the peasants' better opportunities for political organization rather than because they were unusually repressed." Such a theory fits well with current research on Italian state development: Allegiance to early modern Italian states was built through their success in acting as mediators between conflicting class and corporate interests in society. Marino made this point convincingly for southern Italy, and historians of northern Italian states have emphasized that a similar process characterized state development there as well. [2]

In rural Italy, the state mediated disputes between lords and villagers through the judicial system. Although the institutional mechanisms of this process are now better understood, we know little about the political ideas of the villagers who used the state to address their grievances. By contrast, urban political culture, especially in northern and central Italy, has a rich and controversial historiography. Putnam's analysis of Italy's uneven political development in the twentieth century underscored the long-lasting impact of civic traditions that emerged with the rise of the medieval urban commune--what he called "horizontal solidarity." Historians of early modern Italy have taken issue with this model. Muir persuasively critiqued Putnam's analysis, raising concerns about both its historical accuracy and its relevance to the rest of Italy, especially rural Italy, where local political culture, as Epstein indicates, is still largely unknown. [3]

Could the "civic" tradition exist outside an urban setting? In the countryside around Rome, many tax-paying men were "citizens" of the village, with the right to participate in the village assembly and serve in village offices during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Those citizens and their families, however, were also the "vassals" of their lords, who still claimed extensive jurisdiction over them in the early modern period. They were simultaneously subjects of the pope, whose temporal government, most historians believe, was the weaker of the two governing authorities in the region. Political authority there is usually analyzed as a struggle between these two competing rulers. Records from village communal governments, especially the notes from the meetings of village assemblies, suggest that this bifurcated view of power in the countryside obscures the realities of its governance in the early modern period. Village sources, however, illuminate the tripartite nature of this political power and und ermine the argument that either noble or papal authority mattered more than village politics in the Roman countryside. [4]

Village consiglio records are among the rarest documents related to the political history of rural Europe. Although they certainly do not provide, to use Scott's phrase, the "hidden transcript" of the villagers' views of power, they are one of the few sources for the political ideas of the supposedly tranquil villagers of the early modern Roman countryside. The records of the village meetings offer historians new perspectives on village politics, although they often contain considerable gaps, and their content does not immediately dazzle researchers. The consiglio focused upon what might be called the politics of everyday life: finding and paying school teachers and village doctors, repairing church steeples, renting communal property, maintaining food and water supplies, negotiating controversies over animal grazing and agriculture, and avoiding tax demands from Rome. This article, however, treats an extraordinary, rather than an ordinary, political event in the village of Nerola. During a lengthy controver sy with Maffeo Barberini, their lord, the Nerolani elaborated a number of ideas during consiglio meetings that provide valuable clues to their political culture during the seventeenth century. [5]

Between the 1640s and the 1680s, the villagers disputed the claim of their lord to a monopoly on hunting and fishing rights in the village. Many characters appear in the detailed narrative to follow--a new landowning noble family, anxious to control every aspect of its jurisdiction in the countryside; the intervening magistrates, whose legal decisions the villagers' pursued, but whose opinions they ultimately ignored; and the beleaguered official of the noble family, surrounded by uncooperative villagers and disloyal fellow officials. The villagers, however, are the central figures in the narrative and analysis that follows. Their level of political sophistication and free-spirited attitude toward their Roman rulers can best be grasped in a conflict that "cut them to the quick," as the Barberini's overwhelmed official noted in 1685. Legally, the villagers of Nerola were at the bottom of a political hierarchy that gave nobles the right to make laws and papal magistrates the role of interpreting them. This art icle explains how the Nerolani challenged this view of who governed the Roman countryside, using texts and ideas that had been brought to the village for other purposes.

UNCOVERING VILLAGE POLITICS Late in July 1685, two naked men ran from the Corese river and vanished into the countryside north of Rome. They were residents of the nearby village of Nerola, a fief belonging to the Barberini family. In 1685, the padrone of the family was Maffeo Barberini, who jealously guarded his rights as "lord" of all the villagers (naked or otherwise). Cristiano Leggiardi and Mariano Angelonio fled without most of their clothes after they were spotted by a guard of the Barberini family. He claimed that what the two men were doing down in the Corese river was fishing, or, to put it in criminal terms, poaching in the precious trout reserves that the Barberini declared belonged only to the noble family but that the villagers argued were rightfully their own. [6]