Dives Episcopus: La signoria dei vescovi di Volterra nel Duecento by Jacopo Paganelli (review)

Reviewed by: Dives Episcopus: La signoria dei vescovi di Volterra nel Duecento by Jacopo Paganelli Giulio Silano Dives Episcopus: La signoria dei vescovi di Volterra nel Duecento. By Jacopo Paganelli (Rome: Viella, 2021. Pp. 216. $26.55. ISBN: 978-8-83-313796-4.) Ex professo, this book sets out to question and subvert an historiographical topos, namely that rural lords in high medieval Italy were unable to adapt to the new market conditions engendered by re-urbanization and the creation of vigorous [End Page 153] urban communes; in particular, ecclesiastical lordships, such as bishoprics and monasteries, are often taken to have failed to recover from the loss of regalian rights and to have entered a state of permanent marginality in the new economy dominated by the urban elites. The case of the bishops of Volterra had been grist for the historiographical mill in the fashioning of this topos. It is elegant to use the same case in order to strive to upset the consensus. The author masterfully makes use of newly available rich notarial evidence, painstakingly identified and assessed, to build a compelling argument for the view that the bishops of Volterra, at least in the second half of the thirteenth century, did not sit around pining for the lost principality that their predecessors had established in the course of the twelfth century. That principality, first grounded in fact, then given legal sanction by imperial diplomas of Emperors Barbarossa and Henry VI, had made the bishops also the locus of delegated secular authority over their diocese. Those princely prerogatives were successfully challenged and largely subsumed by the urban communes in the first half of the thirteenth century. The bishops responded to the new situation by a careful assessment of what was left to them of their lordly powers. They managed to preserve their sovereignty over a number of castles within their diocese as well as a stake in salt production, and in uniquely rich silver mines and a mint which continued to play an important role in providing coinage for the economic expansion far beyond the boundaries of their diocese. Although their appointments of officers seem to have proceeded more from love than law, they appear to have found loyal and effective servants who helped them to be attentive to the vagaries of the newly central urban markets with regard to all the resources whose production had remained in their hands. On the basis of the surviving account books and other notarial records, the author is able to conclude that the bishops of Volterra managed to tot up an impressive income that compares favorably to what the urban communes were able to derive from their management of the powers of which they had deprived the bishops. The author is happy to conclude that, at least until the end of the thirteenth century, the bishop of Volterra could still be called a dives episcopus. The case just outlined is made by the author in a sustained and compelling way with an intelligent use of the evidence available. Whenever extrapolation is required, the reader is informed that such is the case and is told what assumptions are being brought to bear so that the effort to challenge the topos can be said to be successful. If one has to carp, it is with regard to the relatively little attention paid to the income and expenses of the bishops as bishops rather than as rural lords. Although allusion is made to the ecclesiastical character of this specific lord and to the other heads of income and expenses flowing from that character, the local archives appear not to have preserved comparable records for these items. Still, some investigation may be worthwhile of the burdens imposed by the Apostolic See on the bishops of Volterra, and one might at least be told of the assessment of the value of the bishopric and the consequent charges to which it may have been subjected by the papacy's growing [End Page 154] fiscal impositions. But these are small gripes in the face of an otherwise exemplary study and re-evaluation of an ecclesiastical lordship. Giulio Silano St. Michael's College, University of Toronto Copyright © 2024 The Catholic...

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