Mad Blood Stirring: Vendetta and Factions in Friuli during the Renaissance.

In the past decade, few English-speaking historians have given more thought to the Italian school of microhistory than has Edward Muir. One result of that attention has been the series of translations, Selections from Quaderni Storici, which he and Guido Ruggiero have begun to publish. At the same time, in papers and the introductory essay to the second of those volumes, Muir has analyzed the methods and assumptions of Carlo Ginzburg, his precursors and his imitator's.(1) Now, in Mad Blood Stirring, he puts his hand to a microhistory of his own.

To make sense of the work, it is best to review what microhistory attempts to do. One should think of this Italian innovation not as a method, but as a mere approccio, if we can borrow back a loan word. Microhistory dictates no lines of investigation and validates no canons of proof. By now, many social historians recognize the lineaments of the genre: a taste for narrative, a liking for the marginal and the bizarre, a passion for untangling all the causal threads that knot in a situation, a penchant for spinning hypotheses, and a modicum of shyness about drawing larger lessons. Let us take these traits in order to see what Muir has wrought.

As for story, we have here the tale of a dreadful massacre, first in Udine, North Italy, on Carnival's Fat Thursday, 1511, and then throughout its hinterland. The adherents of Antonio Savorgnan, capo of a noble family and champion of the poor and marginal, turned on the clans of his hereditary enemies, the castellans of the Strumieri faction, butchering them with pre-modern gusto. Savorgnan led the Venetian faction; his enemies backed the German Empire in a desperate war. Muir follows the tale through Savorgnan's treason, deposition, flight and murder, and then traces the blood feud through its eclipse, revival, and guttering end as it dwindles into raucous pamphleteering over points of honor and then, finally, in mid-century, lapses into brokered peace. We have blood by the bucketful, treachery, anguish and operatic twists, in sum, a story fun to tell.

As for microhistory's marginal and bizarre, Muir offers some of both. Marginality, to begin with, should be blazoned on the escutcheon of Udine's province, Friuli. Venice's northeastern frontier, it was a cultural borderland of alpine and peninsular, of Germanic, Italic and even Slav. Its dialect was almost a language of its own. As we know from Carlo Ginzburg's books, its folkways were obscure, syncretic and often singular. Urban life was weak and Venetian role and law were tentative and incomplete. Much real political power rested in kinship chains and consortia that had for centuries used vendetta as a disorderly machinery for keeping a shred of public order. As in much microhistory, the margin illuminates the center; the rest of Italy is reflected in this distorted mirror. As for the bizarre, we have the dog and pig that eat the brains of the dead Savorgnan, two emblematic beasts which become the subject of the author's long meditation on the cultural roots and ramifications of murder.

When he turns to unravelling the causal skein, Muir often goes in directions that could content even scholars who have no taste or use for microhistory. They will find rich material, well documented and well laid out, on economic conditions, agricultural problems, systems of clientage, and on the pressures the metropolis could place on a strategic hinterland. Many of the causes of the crisis in Friuli, Muir holds, were structural and economic. Micro-analysis here seeks macro-causes. When it comes to the conduct of the feud, the analysis turns more anthropological. The anthropophagic dog and pig, whether real or legendary, become the subject of lively speculations on the connections between the habits of vendetta killing and the folklore of hunting. As often happens with anthropology, the researcher has no smoking gun, no native informant who says, "And this is why we do it." The argument, perforce, must remain circumstantial and speculative. As for the eventual decline of blood feud, the perennial Friulan political game, Muir, like Norbert Elias and the historians of courts and manners who followed him, looks to the rise of civility, expressed in duelling, courtesy, self-control and nascent self-knowledge.

What of microhistory's hypotheses and shy larger lessons? Muir tries to make sense of an extraordinary event, a break-down in the routine of humdrum limited feuding. He argues for disequilibrium; Antonio Savorgnan had over-reached himself, upsetting the rough factional equality that had kept the system balanced. But feuds were never "self-regulating." They had always responded to outside forces. In 1511, the urgent military crisis of Venice helped push vendetta over a catastrophic brink into class warfare.

This is a rich and provocative book, with its feet firmly planted in the archives and its head in interesting literatures. Not only Italianists, but other social historians of many sorts could make good use of it.

Thomas V. Cohen York University

ENDNOTE 

1. E. Muir, "Introduction: Observing Trifles," in Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe, edited by E. Muir and G. Ruggiero (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), pp. vii-xxviii.