Family and Public Life in Brescia, 1580-1650: The Foundations of Power in the Venetian State.

With the annexation of Brescia in 1426 and Bergamo in 1428, Venetian dominion over the terraferma stretched from the Friuli well into the heart of Lombardy. Venice's subjugation of the city of Brescia and the surrounding countryside (Bresciano) provided access to a rich supply of minerals, cereals, and mulberries, a new source of indirect taxes (dazi) on foodstuffs and manufactured items, and domination over strategically located roads that were crucial in any confrontation with nearby Milan. Unlike other early modern territorial city-states in Italy - the Duchy of Florence, for instance - which monitored and even redirected the political activities of the elites and institutions of the towns and cities they incorporated into the dominio, Venice initially pursued a policy of minimalism, maintaining, as Ferraro points out, "a skeletal governmental apparatus on the mainland during the early years of its rule" (15). As James Grubb has shown for Vicenza, and now Ferraro for Brescia, Venetian rectors presided over criminal justice and intervened in local affairs largely to mediate disputes among the natives, but Venice did not impose its own laws on the mainland, leaving intact the provincial political administration and ruling classes, including their prerogatives and privileges. The efficient exploitation of the mainland became a paramount concern only in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the Republic's maritime empire and industrial production declined. New magistracies were created for the purpose of supervising the judicial, fiscal, and economic affairs of the mainland, yet, as Ferraro emphasizes, the pragmatic Venetian rulers always understood and acted upon the principle that their hegemony "could only rest on collaboration with local powers" (18).

The three chapters devoted to the consolidation of the ruling class center on questions relating to citizenship and nobility, marriage bonds, patrimonial strategies, and intra-family relations. The author illustrates how citizenship in late medieval and early modern Brescia, rather than being a vehicle of enfranchisement, was wielded to cement the power of the city's leading families. In the mid-fifteenth century, eligibility for urban and rural magistracies was limited to cittadini benemeriti, or to citizens who were at least thirty years old, had paid their urban tax assessments since 1438, and had maintained a domicile in Brescia for a minimum of twenty-five years. After 1488, hereditary membership in the city's General Council was restricted to three groups: cittadini benemeriti, original citizens whose families had been continuously enrolled in the urban estimo since 1426, and other candidates who could prove that their forebears had been domiciled in Brescia for at least fifty years. By the sixteenth century, Brescia's ruling class, undergoing a process of aristocratization that was thoroughly reshaping social and political life almost everywhere in the Peninsula, crystallized into an official civic nobility whose families were registered in the Book of Gold (1509). Membership in the General Council was now equated with noble status. Beyond ancestry, nobility was also based on the exercise of a profession (law, notariate, or medicine). By definition, artisans or any who worked with their hands could not claim to be noble.

Ferraro marshals substantial archival documentation to support her conclusion that within this ruling class an inner circle of families, bound by ties of kinship, monopolized lucrative public institutions (the Monte di Pieta, hospitals, estimo, and the system of grain provisioning) for their own benefit. Equally persuasive is her detailed discussion of how this small group relied simultaneously on endogamous marriage alliances and the restriction of marriage to only one or two children within a family as strategies to conserve its rank and patrimonial wealth. However, I found the by-now obligatory discussion of "women and property" garbled, superficial, and exhibiting an unfamiliarity with the scholarship on this issue, which is a pity since there appear to be extensive Brescian sources regarding the disposition and testamentary transmission of bona mulieris. Thankfully, this section is not typical of the book, for the author's impressive command of the scholarship on early modern Italy has clearly informed her research and her laudable attempt to place early modern Brescia in a comparative historical context.

JULIUS KIRSHNER University of Chicago