E. Igor Mineo. Nobilita di stato: Famiglie e identita aristocratiche nel tardo medioevo. La Sicilia.

Rome: Donzelli editore, 2001. xxii + 346 pp. index, tbls. bibl. i24.79. ISBN: 88-7989-642-3.

Nobilta di stato forms a triptych. The central panel--which concentrates the reader's intellectual energies--offers a many-layered depiction of the social history of the Sicilian nobility in the period from the overthrow of Charles of Anjou in 1282 down to 1392, when Sicily became a viceroyalty of the Crown of Aragon. The central panel is framed by two others: the first (chaps. 1-2), a history of the nobility under the Normans and Hohenstaufen; the second (chap. 7), a glance forward to the age of Alfonso the Magnanimous, king of Aragon, who, after coming to the throne in Sicily in 1416, ultimately established the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1442.

Mineo's interpretation deconstructs the myth of the Sicilian baronage as a well-defined and powerful caste capable of winning its independence and emphasizes in its place the nobility's fluidity and complexity as well as the changes it underwent over time. The author, drawing on archives in Messina, Naples, and Palermo, organizes his study around the examination of the customs and practices by which elite families sought to preserve their wealth even in the absence of a well-established notion of lineage. In addition--in several brilliant sections--he does much to unpack the layered meanings of the vocabularies of hierarchy in late-medieval Sicily and to examine the interplay of shifting relations of the local elites to the crown. Finally, the book successfully locates the history of the Sicilian nobility within a European-wide context. Accordingly, the caso siciliano can no longer be seen as peripheral. The dynamics of the construction of a landed elite, investigated here, will be of interest to specialists in the history of feudalism throughout Europe. Above all, in contrast to the nobilities of other regions in Europe, the Sicilian elite proved remarkably diffused and ill-defined from the time of the Norman conquest down to the early fifteenth century.

The most compelling accomplishment of the book is the author's success in weaving together structural analyses without losing sense of change over time. Under the Normans and the Hohenstaufen, two fundamentally different notions of family coexisted: on the one hand, the Norman invaders had introduced a patrilineal structure in which inheritance was governed by the ius francorum; on the other hand, customary law, dating back to the period before the Norman conquest, continued to favor common property within marriage, with both sons and daughters receiving equal shares of the inheritance. It is within this preexisting "grammar" of kinship that the social consequences of the overthrow of the Angevins in 1282 and the creation of the first Aragonese crown of the island must be understood.

Traditionally, it has been assumed that the Vespers and its immediate aftermath were evidence of a well-defined baronage, capable of unseating the repressive Angevins and, through its parliaments, holding the Aragonese king of the island in check. But Mineo makes a compelling argument that this was not the case. He grants that the feudal regime expanded significantly in the early fourteenth century, but the agnatic model continued to remain the exception, not the rule, and very few families--the Ventimiglia, the Chiaramonte, and the Alagona are the well-known exceptions--were able to maintain their wealth for more than three generations. To Mineo, as a result, the very terms "feudalita" and "baronaggio" are misleading; there was, in his view, no shared or cohesive nobility in Sicily at this time.

The second major event that redefined the Sicilian elite in the late-medieval period was the establishment of Sicily as a viceroyalty of Aragon, the Martinian "restoration" that was itself evidence of the weakness of the island's aristocracy to mount significant resistance. Nonetheless, the early fifteenth century witnessed the diffusion of the agnatic model and an emerging sense of the aristocratic identity. Consequently, the nobility as a group now proved capable of exercising an increasingly important political and institutional role. It was, therefore, in the early 1400s rather than in the early 1300s that the Sicilian nobility had its origins.

A brief review can hardly do justice to the nuances of Mineo's book. In its careful attention to the social dynamics of the creation and the reproduction of elites, the work recalls Duby's La societe aux [XI.sup.e] et [XII.sup.e] siecle dans la region maconnaise (1953). Above all, Mineo's study is a reminder of how misleading it is to use sociological terms without attention to the complexities of local conditions. As historians, we inevitably fall back upon terms such as "nobility" to describe sociopolitical elites in late-medieval and early modern Europe. But such a seemingly innocent term, Mineo cautions, "significa poco," adding "its meaning in fact varies greatly from region to region in Europe, and varies also within diverse historiographies" (vii). Ultimately, it is the contribution of this book to have offered a well-documented and convincing portrait of the complexity and the gradual emergence of the Sicilian "nobility"--a portrait that can take pride of place in the rich gallery of local studies of European elites that began with the work of Marc Bloch in the first half of the twentieth century.

JOHN JEFFRIES MARTIN

Trinity University