UC Santa Barbara UC Santa Barbara Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title “’So that they are not killed and robbed every day’”: The construction and use of popular discourse in Florentine Tuscany, c. 1250-1350 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/108760f8 Author Figliulo-Rosswurm, Joseph Publication Date 2016 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara “So that they are not killed and robbed every day”: The construction and use of popular identity in Florentine Tuscany, ca. 1250-1350 A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in History by Joseph Knox Figliulo-Rosswurm Committee in charge: Professor Carol Lansing, Chair Professor Sharon Farmer Professor Thomas J. Kuehn, Clemson University Professor George W. Dameron, Saint Michael’s College December 2016 The dissertation of Joseph Knox Figliulo-Rosswurm is approved. ________________________________ George W. Dameron _________________________________ Thomas J. Kuehn _________________________________ Sharon Farmer _________________________________ Carol Lansing, Committee Chair May 2016 “So that they are not killed and robbed every day”: The construction and use of popular identity in Florentine Tuscany, ca. 1250-1350 Copyright © 2016 by Joseph Knox Figliulo-Rosswurm iii For my parents, Susan O. Figliulo and Steven J. Rosswurm iv Acknowledgments Italian communal officials spent a lot of time drawing up lists. and I am painfully aware of their invidious nature of lists, excluding as much as they include, and must beg pardon from anyone unintentionally excluded from my list of acknowledgments as I thank the many people and institutions that have made this project possible. I must thank first and foremost my dissertation supervisor. Carol Lansing has supported me in every way imaginable from start to finish, with an enthusiasm and faith in the value of the project that often exceeded mine. Her intellect, deft hand as an adviser and supervisor, and bemused affection for the annoyances and wonders of working in Italy have inspired me for years now. Whatever worth this study has is due in substantial part to her, and to the other members of my dissertation committee. George W. Dameron, Sharon Farmer, and Thomas J. Kuehn have been consistently and uniformly generous with their time and support; I thank them for their critiques and advice at every stage of research and writing. This dissertation developed out of a first-year graduate seminar in medieval social history under Sharon Farmer, and I would like to thank her: she has been a wonderful teacher, editor, critic, and source of intellectual inspiration for many years now. I also thank Edward English, from whom I learned much of what I know about paleography, the dangers of archivally-borne contagions, and the mysteries of Siena. I hope I have repaid his kindness and unhesitating willingness to share medieval Tuscan arcana by doing my bit to deconstruct the myth of Florence, while duly acknowledging the popolo Senese, and not Farinata degli Uberti, as the victors on the battlefield of Montaperti. I have been very fortunate to receive support for research for this project from several sources. A 2013-2014 Fulbright Foundation Fellowship made possible the majority of research in Florence’s Archivio di Stato. A Borchard Foundation Fellowship in European Studies enabled initial exploratory research. Later research carried out during the writing phase of the project was made possible by grants from the Medieval Academy of America, the American Historical Association, and the University of California’s Economic History research group. UC Santa Barbara’s History Department, Medieval Studies Program, and Graduate Division have provided crucial financial support from beginning to end, at every stage of the project’s research and writing stages. I have benefitted tremendously from the vibrant and supportive atmosphere of my home department, History. Hal Drake introduced me to the History Department and its culture, and has been a wonderful example as a colleague and scholar ever since. Elizabeth DePalma-Digeser and Stephen Humphreys contributed in numerous ways during the early phase of the dissertation, and introduced me to the fascinating worlds of the later Roman Empire and Middle Period Islam. Alice O’Connor was a pleasure to work for in several capacities, and her intellectual honesty and commitment to the practice and profession of history is an inspiration, even to scholars of the distant past. Debra Blumenthal provided a warm welcome upon my first visit to UCSB, and has been a wonderful colleague ever since. A translation project for Sears McGee early in graduate school gave me an excellent introduction to the hazards of paleography and orthography while introducing me to the fascinating world of the English Civil War, and I thank him for the experience. Darcy Ritzau is the lynchpin of the whole operation, and helped in v more ways and more often than I can remember. Loretta Holt and Sean Garbutt consistently went above and beyond to ensure that the finances stayed in order, and interpreting many an oracular Italian-language receipt in the process. Without the Interlibrary Loan specialists of UCSB’s Davidson Library, this project would have been quite impossible. Their patient fulfillment of hundreds of obscure requests in numerous languages has always been appreciated. Likewise, the staff of Florence’s Archivio di Stato and Biblioteca Nazionale, and Villa I Tatti’s Berenson Library, were generous with their time and knowledge, and I thank them. I would like to thank in particular the Archivio di Stato di Firenze’s director, Carla Zarilli; the archive has been, and remains, a wonderful place to pursue medieval arcana due to her work, and that of her colleagues. Andrea Zorzi of the Università degli Studi di Firenze generously supported my early research, sharing his time and vast knowledge of Florence’s archival organization and medieval past, helping me to correct several embarassing mistakes I was entirely unaware of at the time, as well as encouraging me to continue research on the Florentine countryside’s place in state formation. I gratefully acknowledge the debt the project owes to him, and his impressive corpus of scholarship. Richard Goldthwaite provided me with a needed crash course in Florentine economic historiography over lunch on an early archival trip. Lisa Kaborycha and Elena Brizio of the Medici Archive Project generously offered their time and expertise as I familiarized myself with the workings of the Archivio di Stato. Guy Geltner graciously introduced me to the riches of Harvard University’s I Tatti Center and Berenson Library, and-equally important-warned me about the coffee machine. W.R. Day, Jr., Silvia Diacciati, Enrico Faini, Patrick Lantschner, Paolo Pirillo, and Chris Wickham provided thoughtful and considered answers via email to several problems of interpretation and context during the writing stage of the dissertation, and I thank them for sharing their time and expertise. Joanne Allen, Andrew Chen, Pasquale Focarile, Anne Leader, Philippe Lefeuvre, Elizabeth Mellyn, and Elizabeth Reid were good friends in and out of the Florentine archives, and I benefitted from their friendship and conversation at various points during my research. Thank you to Francesco for taking me to the fiesolano Festa dell’Unità, and to Pasquale for sharing several bits of cryptic Lucanian wisdom with an American. Many people read individual chapters or the entire dissertation, and I benefitted tremendously from their input; all remaining mistakes are of course mine: George W. Dameron, Abigail Dowling, Edward English, Sharon Farmer, Susan O. Figliulo, Sarah Hanson, Chris Kegerreis, Thomas Kuehn, Carol Lansing, Bianca Lopez, Paul Megna, Nicole Pacino, Kristoffer Smemo, Samir Sonti, Brian Tyrrell. Stefania Tutino generously aided me with particularly obscure points of Tuscan volgare early on; she has furthermore been a wonderful colleague and supervisor, and good friend, for many years. I have also benefitted from presentations of sections of the dissertation, and would like to thank in particular my co-panelists from the Society for Italian Historical Studies’ 2016 conference, George W. Dameron, Bianca Lopez, and Michael Martoccio. The professors and staff of Lake Forest College provided exceptional preparation for the vicissitudes of archival research, in particular, Richard Fisher, Anna Trumbore Jones, Derek Lambert, and Rui Zhu. I hope this study fulfills some of the promise Anna Trumbore Jones saw in a young undergraduate obsessed with the medieval Inqusition, vi and what peasants did about it. I gratefully acknowledge the debt I owe to her example of rigor, stubborn persistance against often-intractable material, and a concern for empirical proof over abstraction. My extended famiglia supported me in more ways than I could recount, year after year, in good times and bad: Susan Figliulo, David Figliulo, Steven Rosswurm, Frank Nordt, the Figliulo and Rosswurm families, Amy Pence, Erika Cortinas. Thank you especially to my godmother, Carlotta Figliulo, for introducing me to the wonderful world of Parisian book fairs, and to my brother David: the web-weaving would be much harder without you. Without friends, life would be immeasurably more difficult, as medieval nobles and peasants alike knew well. My friends have contributed materially, intellectually,