Una parola contesa

Remembering and Forgetting the Ancient City, 2022

Civic traditions were vibrant in early medieval Italy, as the laudes civitatum, gesta episcoporum and a number of other genres reveal. These texts drew on the civic model established in late antiquity and represent an evolution rather than a break with ancient traditions. Yet scholars often view late antiquity or the early Middle Ages as witnessing the end of the ancient civic tradition. Ecclesiastical influence is often taken as the key distinguishing feature: namely that (a) the civitas terrena was replaced by the civitas Dei in contemporary thought and thus that (b) individuals came to identify with their church rather than their city, with patriotism toward the latter more or less completely eclipsed. Yet the ancient and medieval cities cannot be so readily separated. An Ambrose or an Augustine might have ardently wished for the civitas terrena to be eclipsed by the civitas Dei, but such a project was never completely realised. Rather, I will argue that although the interests of church and city were identified, one did not replace the other. Indeed, writers rejoiced in rich churches, virtuous bishops and prosperous flocks as signs of a flourishing urbs, patria and civitas. Explicitly city-focused terms like these evidence the concern of their users with the city itself, and thus with civic ideas, although I will argue that such concerns can be inferred even when these terms are not used explicitly.

Emperors and Imperial Discourse in Italy, c. 1300-1500 : New Perspectives, 2022

The historiography of Italian civic humanism has undergone important renewals since the 1990s. Following the work of Hans Baron, historians have discussed when this concept first emerged and what its criteria are. Identified by discursive, political, and civic characteristics, this movement has long been associated with communal institutions and an anticipated form of modern republicanism. This paper aims to reassess the presence and uses of the notion res publica during the first humanism movement in Italy, in communal and imperial discourses. It discusses the references to this expression, its attributes and the authorities associated with it. The republican notion can be situated in a more long-term moralist tradition and a specific place can be given to the Christianised Cicero – “Tullius” in medieval sources.

https://elibrary.steiner-verlag.de/book/99.105010/9783515121736 For Romans, the group of people constituting ‘the public’ were clearly and narrowly defined: they were the members of the populus Romanus, the institution from which the concept of publicness itself was derived. When they positioned the populus Romanus as the sole political public audience, Roman political discourse and the politicians who used it also defined the populus Romanus as the sole and indivisible source of legitimate public opinion. The conceptual indivisibility of the populus Romanus, when confronted with the ease with which a politician could draw a partisan crowd, generated a range of problems around public opinion which were subtly different from those we find today.

2015

Populism and the origins of the “Second Republic”. A historical institutional perspective.

The Classical Review, 2013

Index nominum Index rerum The idea of studying the transformations of citizenship and civic participation from a diachronic perspective, from the Roman imperial period down to the early Middle Ages, originally emerged during a conversation we had during our stay at Princeton in the fall of 2015, Els Rose as a Member of the Institute of Advanced Study, School of Historical Studies, and Cédric Brélaz as a Stanley J. Seeger Visiting Research Fellow in Hellenic Studies at Princeton University. It soon became clear for us that the best way to address this topic would be to invite experts of different periods and areas to contribute to a collected book whose purpose would be to deal with the changes which affected civic identities over time for the period c. 300-1000 ce. First drafts of chapters were discussed during a conference held on 29-30 November 2018 in Rome, at the Reale Istituto Neerlandese di Roma and at the Istituto Svizzero di Roma. We would like to thank both institutions for hosting the conference, as well as their directors and staff for their interest in our project from the outset, for their generous support, and for their help in organizing the event: Prof. Dr Harald Hendrix, Ms Kathleen van Dijk, and Ms Agnieszka Konkol at the Dutch Institute, and Mrs Joëlle Comé, Dr Adrian Brändli, and Mrs Anna Schulz Seyring at the Swiss Institute. The conference and the publication of this book were made possible thanks to generous grants from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO VICI-Rose 277-30-002 Citizenship Discourses in the Early Middle Ages, 400-1100 and NWO Open Access grant 36.201.012), from Utrecht University, from the Swiss National Science Foundation, and from the Fonds de recherche du Centenaire of the University of Fribourg. We also thank Dr Megan Welton, Teun van Dijk BA, Anne Sieberichs BA, and Xavier Mabillard BA for their help in the preparation and editing of the manuscript. Finally, our acknowledgement goes to Prof. Yitzhak Hen (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) for welcoming this volume in the 'Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages' series of which he is the director and for his constant support, to the anonymous reviewer of the manuscript, to Guy Carney as editorial manager of the series, as well as the staff of Brepols Publishers for taking care of the publication of the book, as both hard copy and open access simultaneously, in the best possible way.

It is generally accepted that the final section of Brunetto Latini’s Li Livres dou Tresor, known as his Politica, is largely based upon Giovanni da Viterbo’s De regimine civitatum. Notwithstanding this agreement on the derivative relationship between both texts, Latini’s Politica continues to puzzle scholars. Based upon a historically informed textual comparison and analysis this article argues that the amount of intervention by Brunetto Latini – and its coherence in direction – is highly instructive on the originality of Latini’s rewriting and indicative of its purpose. Finally, this article sheds light on the historical factors underlying Latini’s decision to select Giovanni da Viterbo’s manual as his copy-text. For the online version of this article (and the other articles in this issue), please consult: http://www.rmojs.unina.it/index.php/rm.

The Renaissance of Roman Colonization: Carlo Sigonio and the Making of Legal Colonial Discourse, ed. J. Pelgrom and A. Weststeijn , 2020

Carlo Sigonio's treatises on the rights and obligations of Roman citizens and of the inhabitants of Italy and the provinces, brought together in 1574 as De iure antiquo populi Romani libri XI, were the greatest single contribution by a Renaissance humanist to the study of the institutions of the Roman Republic and its empire. This paper analyses the treatises' structure and aims, assesses their achievement in the light of modern scholarship, and discusses their continuing impact down to the nineteenth century. Special attention is paid to Sigonio's treatment of colonization and agrarian legislation.

GROMA, 2018

Spazi pubblici e dimensione politica nella città romana: funzioni, strutture, utilizzazione (Public Spaces and political dimensions in the Roman city: functions, structures, use) is the final product of two international meetings which took place between March and October 2015, the first in Clermont-Ferrand, the last in Bologna. The meetings' main topic was public life and political administration in Western Roman cities. The aim of the encounters was to attempt a multidisciplinary approach to the research on public urban spaces. For that purpose, two basic lines of study were followed. One is related to the school of ancient topography of Bologna University, which can claim great scholars like Arturo Solari, Nereo Alfieri and Guido Achille Mansuelli, while the other, more historical, is linked to the Clermont-Ferrand University tradition and the research program led by Mareille Cébeillac-Gervasoni, to whose memory the book is dedicated.